Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Few
citizens of the US have been able to imagine what the world would be like if
the immense effort of dominating the world militarily, including planning for
nuclear war, had been directed toward finding ways to abolish nuclear weapons--by
getting to know “the enemies,” understanding their problems, looking for
jointly satisfactory solutions, and thereby converting the trillions spent on
arms to the needs of all species. Had
our leaders rejected world domination, we also would have had the financial and
social resources, if not to save the world from the warming catastrophe
advancing against life on earth, but at least to have softened its severest
effects.

That
level of empathy few US leaders or citizens have achieved. Instead, again and again our leaders have constructed
one “axis of evil” after “axis of evil.”
Nor have they grasped the reality of warming shown us by the scientists
who decades ago warned the world. Perhaps
such blindness is the inevitable result of not only not understanding the
deepest roots of our national crisis, but not even trying acknowledge them—patriarchy
and unrestrained capitalism.

BOOKS CITED IN EDITORIALS RECEIVED FULL TITLES and
DATES PRESENTED ON KPSQ These
editorials of 5 to 7 minutes appeared on KPSQ from April 2017 to September 2018 derived mainly from the following books.

Andrew
J. Bacevich. America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military
History. Random House, 2016. (# forthcoming). Other relevant books: Breach
of Trust, Washington Rules, The Limits of Power, The New American
Militarism, American Empire,
etc.

William
Blum. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (1986,
updated 2004). (#
forthcoming). (Blum’s
other books: Rogue State:
Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
(2000); Freeing the World to Death:
Essays on the American Empire
(2005); America’s Deadliest Export:
Democracy (2013).

William
Blum. Rogue State: Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000). (#
forthcoming).

James Carroll.
House of War: The Pentagon and the
Disastrous Rise of
American Power. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. (# 42, 8-18-18)

Chalmers
Johnson. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire (2000); The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy,
and the End of
the Republic (2004); Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic (2006); Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (2010). (#
forthcoming)

Bill
McKibben. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books,
Henry Holt, 2010.. (# forthcoming).

D.
L. O’Huallachain & J. Forrest Sharpe, eds. Neo-Conned!. and Neo-Conned!
Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and
the Rape of Iraq. The Illegality and the
Injustice of the Second Gulf War. Light in the Darkness Pubs., JHS Press,
2005.

Cleo
Paskal. Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political
Crises Will Redraw the World
Map (2010). (#20, 3-10-18, and #40,
8-4-18)

John Quigley.
The Ruses for War: American
Interventionism Since World War
II. Prometheus,
1992. (#44, 9-1-18)
Jeremy Rifkin. Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century. Crown, 1991. (#47, 9-22-18).

“Today, global environmental damage rises
intolerably. The fossil fuel and nuclear
industries now possess the capability of destroying planetary systems necessary
for life on Earth to exist and thrive, and they have made governments worldwide
their partners in a dangerous chase of profit.” (340).

My reference today is Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age by Mary Christian
Wood. Cambridge UP, 2014.My title is: A new form of patriotism:
planetary patriotism, citizens of the world.

As Bill McKibben makes clear, continuing
to use and exploit carbon would produce enough emissions—five times over—to
heat the planet to a level of catastrophic and irreversible climate
change. Yet fossil fuel corporations
remain bent on burning all of the petroleum and coal in their proven reserves. That’s why McKibben and countless others call
the fossil fuel industry “Public Enemy Number One” to the survival of human
civilization.

We look to affirmative government for the
People, to organize large resources to help people solve large problems. Instead, too many government agencies today
have been captured by the industries they regulate. Environmental law cannot protect societies
afflicted with an economic system that devours both the natural resources and
the democratic institutions necessary for our existence and perpetuation.

So you and I must confront today’s
predatory capitalism. We must reject a
profit-based system that ignores ecological costs, that enables a dangerous
dependence on fossil fuels, unlimited economic growth, and a culture of overconsumption,
that empowers corporations to inflict staggering ecological damage,

that
encourages the growth of a military weapons industrial jobs program to enrich a
few, and kills, wastes, and pollutes globally, that divides the rich and poor,
and that ensures the money of a few controls our politics.

That seems an impossibly large agenda for
urgent change. There is little we can
do, for example, to stop the rise of the world’s oceans, though we may be able
to slow the rate of
sea level rise.
We can’t stop it, but if we slow it down we can adapt to it better or
worse, wisely or harmfully. And we
know how. We can minimize the impact of
sea level rise in the next century by keeping fossil fuels in the ground now
[mitigation] and moving to higher ground [adaptation]. Strong action to implement the Paris Climate
Accord of 2015--and to go well beyond those targets, should be our immediate
goal.

And global citizens waking up to the
prospect of runaway climate change must demand accountability from the fossil
fuel industry and the officials in their pocket. People are awakening. Tens of millions of people in grassroots
organizations from schoolrooms to farms, from villages to cities around the
world are advocating for environmental health.

Such far-flung and irrepressible energy
ignites a new form of patriotism:
citizens of the world, believing in affirmative government for the
People, vowing allegiance not to land as commodity for market exploitation, but
to land as commonwealth--planetary patriotism.

495

References

Mary C. Wood. Nature’s
Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age. 2017.

Global
warming represents the final conflict in the war against nature.

My
reference today is Biosphere Politics: A
New Consciousness for a New Century by Jeremy Rifkin. 1991. My title is:
Conversion of the US War on Nature.

The war
against nature, against our original, free commons, began with enormous
enthusiasm just a few hundred years ago in the Industrial Revolution. Its consequence and central meaning have been
the warming of our atmosphere. The war seemingly
has been lost by being won.

During
the recent experiment in free markets, humans attempted to privatize,
commodify, and consume the earth’s generous endowment. Simultaneously we pumped up the planetary
population extraordinarily. And wars
became increasingly destructive and expensive.
Now, in a final twist of
historical irony, we find ourselves enveloped by an atmosphere we created. We have trapped ourselves under a thick layer of
industrial gases that were emitted to run the machines, extract the minerals,
grow the crops, graze the livestock, store the produce, and ship the goods.

The
greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane—that now pollute
the atmosphere are the chemical record of the lethal age of exuberant growth
and consumption, the three-hundred-year war against nature.

It need not have happened, but until
recently few people foresaw the calamity inherent in burning fossil fuels.

But perhaps
the worst can still be avoided through a few obvious changes, particularly the
conversion from a consuming commercial and military to a biosphere culture,

For
example consider the US and the Middle East and the first Iraq war in 1990. If President Bush I and Congress had recognized
the harms of free market capitalism and had raised the automobile
fuel-efficiency standards from 27.5 mpg to 35, raised the gasoline tax by fifty cents per
gallon, and taxed large gas-guzzling automobiles, C02 would have been stabilized,
and US leaders could not have so easily argued
and the populace would not so easily have believed the economy needed oil from
the Middle East, and the US would not have risked US lives and wasted billions
of dollars in military deployment around the world, money needed to prepare for
the climate catastrophe.

As the
example of cars shows, the US must lead the way against harmful overconsumption
and militarization of the planet to a biosphere culture at peace with
nature. The US must lead by
restructuring its economy away from a consumerist and military-industrial
complex and toward a sustainable bioregional infrastructure, because the
threats of resource scarcity, global CO2 pollution, and nuclear war pose far
greater threats to the security of the planet than do the traditional national
rivalries.

Thus we
might reduce global warming and the severity of its effects, and even
significantly delay the final conflict in the human and especially US war
against nature.

(The Following was Deleted at
last minute to be under 500 words.)

Now, after a long and protracted battle to capture,
enclose, and consume the global commons, we are, in turn, being enclosed by the
discarded waste of our own consumption.

… particularly by converting the Pentagon, the
largest single institution emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, from war
to peace.

And
such a change will simultaneously pressure the nuclear nations to abolish their
nuclear warheads and to provide the money needed to mitigate and adapt to the
climate emergency. We already know that
the speed of intercontinental delivery of nuclear bombs has made military
security a virtual technological impossibility.
As one Pentagon official said, “Speed is the tightening noose around our
neck.”

We have
reached the conjuncture of our planet’s two greatest dangers that won’t be
solved by wars.

The
preceding four editorials resumed the subject of the wars of the USofA (42
Carroll, 43 Ellsberg, 44 Quigley, 45 Gerson).
The cost of America’s post-9/11 wars has passed $6 trillion, and the
price tag will continue to climb right along with temperatures, atmospheric
CO2, methane, and sea levels.

I am now
transitioning to my crucial, linkage subject-- the convergence of US wars, the
nuclear danger, and the climate catastrophe.
My chief source today is the
essay: “Is Climate The Worst Casualty of War?”
By Stacy Bannerman, published in Common Dreams, July 31, 2018. My title is: Pentagon’s War on the Climate.

How do you end quickly a public meeting on
the climate? Start talking about war. It’s not just environmentalists that leave.
Mission accomplished by the US bipartisan War Party, which sends the military
and their families to war, and the rest of the country to shopping malls and Disney
World. Mission accomplished by the War
Party, for the public little realizes how massive is the carbon footprint of
America’s endless wars, because military emissions abroad have a blanket
exemption from national reporting.

The Pentagon’s footprint is enormous. It uses more petroleum per day than the
aggregate consumption of 175 countries (out of 210 in the world), and generates
more than 70 percent of this nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. “The U.S. Air Force burns through 2.4 billion
gallons of jet fuel a year, all of it derived from oil.” Since the start of the
post-9/11 wars, U.S. military fuel consumption has averaged about 144 million
barrels annually.

The money misspent on the continuing 27-year
two Iraq wars alone—wars for oil, let’s not forget— could have purchased the
planetary conversion to renewable energy. That figure doesn’t include fuel used
by coalition forces, military contractors, or the massive amount of fossil
fuels burned in weapons manufacturing.

Following from this military footprint, we
can look forward to an escalation in killing and warming, global food
insecurity, massive refugees, and diseases, with children bearing the main
burden.

Nevertheless, public health agencies
don’t discuss what war costs our climate when they discuss what climate change
will cost our children. Religious communities
and environmentalists are mobilizing on the behalf of healing and protecting the
planet. But the topic of America’s
literal war on the world is still off the White House/Congress table.

We’ve got wind farms to build and
pipelines to stop. We’ve got solar panels to install and water to protect. But
our leaders feed the fossil-fueled military beast chewing up nearly 60 percent
of the national budget. In order to achieve the massive transformations
required for mitigating climate change and advancing climate justice, we must stop
the violence of U.S. foreign policy that is pouring fuel on the fire of global
warming.

We have to de-frock the sacred bombers at
the Pentagon, because climate may be its worst victim of all.

The hands of the Doomsday Clock
are two minutes from midnight from the two greatest dangers to our
civilization. Life itself is on the line. It is time to find your voice.

And the big environmental
organizations seem to have tacitly agreed that we won’t mention the U.S.
military when we talk about the biggest contributors to climate change.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #45, EMPIRE
AND THE BOMB: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World by
Joseph Gerson. Pluto/AFSC, 2007. Broadcast Sept. 8, 2018.

Ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the US has deployed nuclear weapons as the centerpiece of its strategy for global
hegemony.

My main source today is EMPIRE AND THE BOMB: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the
World by Joseph Gerson. 2007. The title of my editorial is: For World Peace and Preservation, Abolish
Nuclear Weapons.

The
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs set off a second chain-reaction: the proliferation
of nuclear weapons. Other nations sought
to counter or to emulate Washington’s ability to practice nuclear
terrorism. Next came the Soviet Union
and Britain, then France and China. They were followed by Israel, India,
Pakistan, and North Korea. President
Obama called for the spending of a trillion dollars to expand the US arsenal,
under the guise of updating it. President Trump also increased the Pentagon
budget.

And US
leaders of both Parties have used nuclear supremacy to achieve US foreign
policy objectives. From Truman to Trump,
the threat of preemptive attack by nuclear weapons has been the cornerstone of
the US doctrine of full spectrum dominance, of unmatchable military
power.

The world knows that on at least 30
occasions since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, every US president has prepared and/or
threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises. And in its typical double-standards practice,
while insisting that other nations fulfill their Nuclear Proliferation Treaty
obligations (except for India and Israel, which have not signed the NPT), the
US government has never been serious about its Article VI obligations to engage
in “good faith” negotiations for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.

Common to all US presidencies, regardless
of Party, is their insistence on maintaining the hierarchy, funding,
development, and deployment for new, more usable, extremely expensive, and of
course extraordinarily lucrative nuclear weapons for nuclear terror. Government after government prepared and
threatened genocide, even omnicide, ostensibly to protect the nation, in
reality to preserve the careers, power, prestige, and profits of a few.

US war
doctrines—full-spectrum dominance and mutually assured destruction, or MAD--
have had enormously de-stabilizing effects, in that they provoked fear and
resistance to US hegemony, resulting in a defensive drive by other countries to
acquire nuclear weapons.

This
national security obsession by our leaders to construct a National Security
State costing trillions of dollars, also helps to explain why for three decades,
comfortable with their weapons cash cow firmly established in every niche of US
society, elites denied scientists’ warnings of dangerous warming the mitigation
of which would compete with Pentagon budgets.

And now
the US faces the two global catastrophes of nuclear war and winter and climate
warming and extreme weather.

What’s to be done with US nuclear full spectrum
dominance and mutually assured destruction so replete with risk and expense? There will be no security until the peoples
of the US and the world push to abolish all nuclear arsenals.

References to 45

Joseph Gerson.
EMPIRE AND THE BOMB: How the US
Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.
2007.

Related:

Quigley. The
Ruses of War.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #44, The Ruses
for War: American Interventionism Since World War II, by John Quigley. 1992. By
Dick Bennett. Broadcast 9-1-18.

My
subject today is US militarism.

My source is The Ruses for War: American Interventionism Since World War II, by
John Quigley. 1992. My title is: “Lies, the Main Foundation for
US Wars.”

Why
did the US Marines land in the Dominican Republic in 1966? To protect US citizens there, President
Johnson argued falsely. Why did President Reagan send troops to Grenada in
1983? For the same false excuse.

US military actions taken over the last 70
years, offer an encyclopedia of lies, coverups, distortions, and manipulations
by our country’s leaders for the purpose of deluding the public into war.

The
lying feeds itself. The false stories
become part of a whole body of spurious information to be drawn upon in future
interventions. When war broke out in
Korea, President Truman argued that the Soviet Union was preparing to conquer
the world. The same argument drew us
into the Vietnam War and dominated US decisions during the Cuban missile crisis. False
information bolstered a new false story, this one with catastrophic potential
to the planet.

Typically, presidents have been led to
commit US troops to foreign soil for economic and strategic reasons, especially
for oil. However, as President Bush I
learned in the Person Gulf in 1990, war for resources needs reinforcement. When in 1990 Bush I’s call to citizens to go
to war evoked placards saying “No Blood For Oil,” he switched to defense of
Kuwait and lied that Saddam’s troops had
murdered a baby. A succession of US administrations have argued
falsely that we had to go to war to fight aggression to protect US citizens, or
to combat a Soviet threat to our freedom and way of life. And now it is the Russian threat—and Chinese,
and N. Korean—countries completely surrounded by US or allied armed forces.

Presidents have usually gotten away with
their good/evil double standards. The US
invaded Iraq because it had invaded Kuwait, but we did not invade Israel with
it invaded Lebanon in 1982, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. Our leaders’ stratagems and tricks, invasions
and interventions, are accepted by the majority ignorant, credulous, and
fearful public, at least at first, and protest is usually feeble.

Thus, if you add to these depredations
the enormous catastrophic likely consequences of climate change, for decades
neglected and even denied by profit-obsessed leaders, humanity faces an
emergency from nuclear war and the warming world.

What can we do at the least? In a representative government, we can
educate. We can demand the right to know
the real reasons for future US wars. We
can demand every child be taught the United Nations Charter, which prohibits national
aggression.

But the times are urgent. We must abolish nuclear
weapons and stop serial war-making aggression and end fossil fuels emissions. Until then, our young men and women will
continue to be sent to their deaths overseas without knowing why but believing they
are protecting the US from foreign aggression.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #43, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: CONFESSIONS OF A
NUCLEAR WAR PLANNER BY DANIEL ELLSBERG.
2017. Broadcast August 25, 2018

My reference today is THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: CONFESSIONS OF A NUCLEAR WAR PLANNER BY DANIEL
ELLSBERG. 2017. The title of my editorial is the question: Have
We Prepared Omnicide?

Do
We Still Have the Choice Today, as Martin Luther King, Jr., asked, of
Nonviolent Coexistence or Violent Coannihilation?

Much the same inordinately powerful
institutions and elites tenaciously obstruct solution to our two greatest
existential challenges: global warming and nuclear war. Today
I’ll apply the question of my title to nuclear war.

The Cold War supposedly ended, but the
United States and Russia each have an actual Doomsday Machine. Each machine is composed of their nuclear
arsenals on such massive scale—sufficient to end human civilization.

Each
is an extremely expensive system of humans, machines, and institutions which could
with high probability bring about the global destruction of civilization and of
nearly all human life on earth. The two
systems are on hair-trigger alert, susceptible to a false alarm, a terrorist
action, an unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate. They would kill billions of humans and likely
end complex life on earth.

Does the United States need a Doomsday
Machine? Does Russia? Does the existence of such a capability
serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would
justify its obvious danger to human life?

Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability? A right to threaten—by its possession of that
capability—the continued existence of all other nations and their populations?

We can say NO, and we can dismantle the
machines just as we constructed them.
And that, at a minimum, is what we must hasten to do.

To move toward abolition of nuclear
weapons, we should and could

+
institute no-first-use and no-first-strike policies,

+make
Congress apply what’s known about the complete catastrophe of nuclear winter to
present policies,

+eliminate
our ICBMs,

+admit
as delusory preemptive damage-limiting first strike ideas, +abandon the
profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on these delusions;

+that
is, dismantle the US Doomsday military industrial complex.

But both US Parties, both the Repubs and the
Demos, as currently constituted oppose every measure possessing the possibility
of meaningful control of nuclear weapons.
The same type of heedless, shortsighted, and reckless decision-making
and lying about it has characterized our government’s nuclear planning, threats, and preparations throughout the nuclear
era, risking a catastrophe incomparably greater than all together the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure to prepare for Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf
oil spill, and financial disasters affecting millions and costing
billions.

And yet, as demonstrated by the downfall
of the Berlin Wall, the nonviolent dissolution of the Soviet empire, and the
shift to majority rule in South Africa, all unimaginable just thirty years ago,
unjust and dangerous misrule are not all-powerful. 466

Reference for #43

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: CONFESSIONS OF A NUCLEAR WAR PLANNER BY DANIEL ELLSBERG.
2017.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #42 the Pentagon, US
Militarism, broadcast August 18, 2018. Ref:
James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon
and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.
2006.

With the last editorial on climate wars, I returned to
another series on US militarism, empire, and climate change. Today’s editorial , #42, discusses the
Pentagon.

My
reference is, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise
of American Power by James Carroll,2006.

What
does the Pentagon mean, to the USA? How
is its influence felt, its power exercised?
Who decided to link US foreign policy to nuclear force? Individuals made decisions of course, but for
each fateful choice the Building made them.
What happened when the impersonal forces of mass bureaucracy, the
Building’s culture, were joined to the critical mass of nuclear power?

Nuclear weapons inform the tale from start to finish, but more as the
gods of a new religion than as mere instruments of war. Anti-Communism gave that religion its first
theology. But this nation’s bipolar
mindset--good USA vs. evil others-- survives the disappearance of Communism, as
the Cold War bleeds into the Global War on Terror. Always, the Pentagon remains
the nation’s sacred temple. At the same
time, the Pentagon remains a nuclear engine room, generating a current for war
that flows inexorably toward the edge of an abyss.

The
Pentagon has been at the center of a profound militarization of US
society. Economic, political, martial,
academic, scientific, technological, and cultural forces combined at the
Pentagon to create the new phenomenon that was well established by the time
Eisenhower warned of it at the end of his presidency.

Money
tells the story. In the twenty years after
World War II, the Pentagon spent nearly $100 billion-- ten times the federal
expenditures devoted to all aspects
of health, education, and welfare in the same period. By 1965, nearly six million Americans were
employed in the enterprises administered from the Pentagon. All aspects of US society were transformed by
military contracts, the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about.

By
1965, for the first time in the country’s history, military assumptions
undergirded America’s idea of itself.
The military-corporate-congressional-executive-mass media-academic
complex achieved a social fission, and the Pentagon was its reactor. 387

By 1965 the militarization of Fortress
America was well-entrenched. Ironically
but deeply revealing, the Pentagon declared that senior officers with their
stars and eagles on shoulders who worked in the Building could wear civilian
clothes to work

The
officer elite in business suits was the perfect emblem of the national transformation
well under way. Our nation became a
garrison state that did not look like one.

The
tremendous budget outlays of the War Department, softened by the illusion of defense
under civilian control, and reinforced by con stant fear mongering, prevented
any real public concern about US imperialism.

There is a
correlation between rising CO2 and temperature and decreasing food
production. Climate warming causes
extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves. Rising temperatures encourage weeds and pests
and threaten fisheries.

Developing nations suffer the most because there, more people are
already poor, and they depend most on agricultural production. Climate change is widely seen as the greatest
threat facing the estimated 500 million smallholder farmers around the world.

Studies
have also given the global North a wake-up call about its own food
security. A 2016 study recorded
droughts and extreme heat significantly reducing cereal production.

A study
assessing extreme heat in the US projected a crop yield decrease by 30-46% at 2
degrees C and by 63-82% at 4 degrees C.
This constitutes a dire emergency for food security.

Now
let’s turn to Climate Wars

As a
result of these studies, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
anticipates the increasing frequency of violent conflicts like civil wars.

The
global human population is projected by the FAO (Food and Agriculture
Organization of the UN) to reach more
than 9 billion by 2050—that’s 30 years
from now--meaning that about 50% more food will be required. Yet as climate warming and extreme weather
deepen, so will lack of food and water.

The UN
reported in 2017 that world hunger is rising, driven by climate change,
population, and conflict, which often go hand in hand.

Six
scenarios explore what could happen in a global struggle for scarce resources
resulting from climate-induced chaos. Although
the scenarios mostly take place later in the century, much of what they envisage
has started to come true already.

There seems
no doubt that economic and political dislocation will increase, followed by strife
and war, if the world becomes a hungrier place.

There
seems also no doubt that facing the crisis now by transitioning now to
renewable energy and thoroughly affirmative government for people will be much more
orderly and economic, and much less destructive and painful for humanity, than
the inevitable climate wars if we fail to come to grips.

High-emitting national governments like the US are continuing to
sacrifice our survival—and the survival of all future generations—for fossil
fuel corporate profits that include oil for global military operations
subsidized with our money. These are
unprecedented crimes.

It is
time for ordinary people who understand this crisis and love their children to
demand now 1) the drastic reduction of the Pentagon imperial regime for
resources, 2) the cessation of government subsidies of fossil fuels, and 3) a
carbon tax on fossil fuels.

It is
becoming increasingly likely that the world will warm by 4 degrees Celsius or
more within the next 500 years, which will transform the conditions of life on
the planet catastrophically. Scientists
and the fossil fuel companies have known this and what must be done to prevent
it since the 1980s, but the fossil fuel industry corrupted our political
representatives and sowed confusion among the public.

From 1977
to 1989, Exxon scientists advised their board of the atmospheric dangers caused
by burning fossil fuels. In 1996
ExxonMobil began its 20-year disinformation campaign of lies. This ethically abhorrent, reckless
disregard for truth constitutes a new kind of crime against humanity—the
criminal negligence of funding climate denial.

In consequence of this crime by the
fossil-fuel companies, aided by government subsidies and tax shelters, business
as usual consumption was shown by 2015, the year of the Paris Summit, the sales
of SUVs and pickup trucks increased, by 2016 the average annual displacement of
the world’s population from extreme weather events was 21.5 million,
displacement of populations another crime against humanity, and by 2017 Trump
pulled the US out of the UN Paris agreement.

The US
failure to protect the people of the earth extends wide and deep.

A
principle of climate ethics is that the countries who have benefited most from
burning fossil fuels, should pay for mitigation and adaptation. Global warming has already unjustly cursed
the lives of millions of displaced people in southern countries, climate
refugees who played little to no role in causing or increasing climate
change. At the 2009 climate conference
in Copenhagen, the developed countries promised to invest $100 billion a year
by 2020. But as of 2017, those countries
had committed only $60 billion, much of which had already been allocated.

By
failing to protect people from industry lies, by subsidizing fossil fuel
companies, by complicity in displacing millions of people, and by reneging on
the promise to aid the impoverished southern countries, the US government and
fossil fuels companies have enabled and encouraged immoral and inhumane corporate
policies for economic gain.

By
not being responsible trustees of the atmosphere, our government officials, fossil
fuels corporation CEOs, and the 1% super rich investors robbed our children and
future generations of their constitutional and public trust rights, and should
be prosecuted. Young people are leading
the way in Juliana v. United States et
al. , led by Our Children’s Trust, with Dr. James E. Hansen, co-plaintiff
on behalf of his granddaughter.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #39, Seager and Polansky,
eds. The
Good Crisis: How Population Stabilization Can Foster a Healthy U.S.
Economy. 2018. Lori Hunter, “Environmental Dimensions of
Population Stabilization.”

Population size and growth cannot be ignored if we are to slow climate
change, but neither can the difference between voracious affluent consumers and
undernourished poor consumers be disregarded.

My
subject today is USA’s population and environmental footprint. A chief source is The Good Crisis editedby
Seager and Polansky.

Population
size and growth fuel the production and consumption treadmill that is a large
cause of climate change. More consumers
create more economic demand, more land developed, more forests cut. As US population increases, so too does the
nation’s overall environmental destruction.

The US environmental
footprint includes not only consumption of natural resources such as water and
land, but also all emissions related to production.
The people of the US consume an
immense amount of meat. Meat production yields
greenhouse gas emissions on account of feed production, energy use in animal
houses, and flatulence, which emits methane.
The ecological cost of consumption by the average US citizen is 2.6
times greater than residents of the world’s other nations and 4.4 times greater
than those specifically in the least wealthy nations.

Population
stabilization requires a critical look at who
we are, not simply how many we
are. Population, production, and consumption-- or population size,
technology, and affluence-- combine
to create the footprint. Not only
population numbers, but excessive consumption and the technological
underpinnings of our life styles combine to drive our large footprint.

The USA
is the culture of consumption, in
which the meaning and purpose of life are derived from purchasing products and
services. US children are socialized
into this culture of commodities where individual identities are bound up in
makes and models of cars, brands of clothes, and ideas of freedom and power.

The
economic system called “neo-liberal capitalism,” or unregulated markets, is
rampant in the US, where all 20 aspects of the free market reign supreme:

Human domination of and alienation from nature

(Market system dominant)

Profit the purpose of system

Taxes favorable to system

Capital accumulation, materialization of profit

Commodification, turning everything into
a product for profit

Growth limitless forprofit

Over-Consumption by developed countries

Monopoly via purchase, consolidation, merger

Corporations, massive lawlessness

Instability of Corporations

Advertising, creating needs, inducing
consumption

[Hostility to the
Commons, social security

Hostility to Organized
Workers, Unions

Hostility to Government Oversight

Hostility to Taxes

Inequality: in 2016 of 1%/99%

GNP/GDP as measurement of
economic success

Wars and imperialism for
resources, space

Waste (see Advertising)]

These
are the 10 of the chief features of our economic self-destruction

In
summary, concern for the climate and the global environment must reduce not only the number of people, but consumption
by the affluent populations mainly located in the northern hemisphere, and
particularly the USA.

Seager and
Polansky, eds. The Good Crisis (on Population Stabilization), 2016. Lori Hunter,
“Environmental Dimensions of Population Stabilization.”

KPSQ EDITORIAL #37, World War II, broadcast
July 14, 2018. Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s
Dedication to War by Edward W. Wood, Jr.
Potomac Books, 2006.

As long
as we believe that evil lies in others and that war is the only means to
justice, we will continue to wreak havoc on the world. My chief reference today is Worshipping the Myths of World War II:
Reflections on America’s Dedication to War by Edward W. Wood, Jr. 2006.
This book relates closely to last week’s book by Roland Worth, Jr.,
about WWII in the Pacific, No Choice But
War.

Perhaps
most of the population of the US believe there is great potential for evil in
human beings, only war can bring justice, and the US is an agency of
justice. The US is impregnably armed
with a black and white way of perceiving reality. This arrogance rationalized the invasion of
Iraq and quick overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who was equated with Hitler. That faith in US exceptionalism fuels the US
War on Terror--the terrorist “enemy” we fear, the enemy we must destroy,
because it is “evil,” although it
necessitates our performing monstrous acts that deny all humanity. Crushing terrorists performs the work of
God. Since “evil” exists outside
ourselves, not in us but in other nations and people, violence and
war are not only necessary, they become “good,” the only means to protect
innocents from barbaric forces.

And thus
we can do with our dehumanized enemies as we please, hold them without trial as
long as we like, torture them, bomb their cities and homes into rubble.

This faith
was virtually universal during WWII. US
goodness was crushing evil enemies. The
evil in the world was being eradicated by the forces of “good” that the US
represented. Total war, smash, kill,
burn the enemy. The Germans were killing
the Jews. Out of our purity we
will destroy the Germans.

But we
have never looked carefully at our own propensities for violence, the hatred we
bear the stranger, the dark-skinned.
Only now, centuries after the fact, are museums and books showing our
destruction of Native Americans and African-Americans, though still almost
nothing about the persons who profited from the slaughter, or from slavery, Jim
Crow, and lynching.

And only during the last ten years has
occurred an outpouring of assessments of US aerial bombing during WWII.

For
example, in the summer of 1943, British and American bombers launched an attack
on the German city of Hamburg that was unlike anything the world had ever
seen. For ten days they pounded the city
with over 9,000 tons of bombs, with the intention of erasing it entirely from
the map. The fires they created were so
huge they burned for a month, and were visible for 200 miles.

Terrible
acts of barbarity were committed during WWII.
The Germans had to be stopped.
But the US had committed and committed during WWII barbarities too.

Thus we
need to absorb the truth, that war may not bring justice, but instead the
corruption of both the defeated and victor.
490

References
#37

Edward W.
Wood, Jr Worshipping the Myths of World
War II: Reflections on
America’s Dedication to War. 2006.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #36, World War II in the
Pacific, broadcast July 7, 2018, No
Choice But War:The
United States Embargo Against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific.McFarland,
1995.by Roland Worth, Jr. (1995).

My
editorials investigate mainly the roots of the US warfare state and the climate
catastrophe. My method is, each week to
represent the main thesis of a book.
Nos. 34 and 35 questioned the necessity and justice of the Spanish-US
War and of WWI. My subject today is
WWII in the Pacific: the US against Japan-- specifically: who started the war, and
why did Japan bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941? My
thesis is: The United States-led
economic embargo played a pivotal role in pushing Japan over the edge into
overt hostilities against the West. And my chief source is No Choice But War by Roland Worth, Jr. (1995).
The US decision to embargo 90
percent of Japan’s petroleum and two-thirds or more of its trade led directly
to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This is not to say the US is villain and
Japan a victim. Japanese militarism was
brutally expanding its empire in East Asia. Its aggressions deserve no sympathy. But it was not seeking war with the US, and the
embargo sealed off the possibility of a peaceful solution.

The US
could have avoided war. No US security
interests were affected. Lobbying against aggression, bringing massive
international shame on the aggressor, enacting limited restrictions instead of
total embargo, could have gained more than did the war’s massive destruction
and killing: in
the Pacific War around 36 million people or 50% of the total casualties of the
Second World War.

The
actual effects of the embargo were recognized by both sides of the war it would
lead to. The impact of the embargo was
not a secret. It was explicitly
recognized by high ranking officials in both governments, and repeatedly
discussed in the American press. The US
decryption program that the total embargo was devastating the Japanese economy
and the opportunity for peace was evaporating rapidly.

We can
only speculate about the alternatives to total boycott. Because the US anti-communist crusade in East
Asia probably never would have occurred, the massive slaughter of two major wars
would not have happened. Would a
Japanese occupation of China been more brutal than was Mao’s revolution? Would a Japanese occupation have led to the anti-communist
Korean and Vietnamese wars?

The Korean and Vietnam Wars were
among the deadliest wars in modern history.
In the Korean War, estimates put the
full battle death toll on all sides at over 1 million, and NK and SK civilian
casualties at a million and a half. In the Vietnam War, some million and a half soldiers were killed, and as many
as 2 million civilians on
both sides.

What is not speculative is the fact that the
US knowingly and intentionally imposed economic strangulation upon Japan. Furthermore, it persisted in that policy
while being aware that the Japanese economy was being wrecked to a degree that
would been intolerable to a US similarly threatened. Few citizens of the US would have felt any guilt
over “firing the first shot” against a nation imposing an embargo on the US,
and few would have felt any compunction in initiating a war against the
embargoing nation.

References #36
WWII in the Pacific

Roland H.
Worth, Jr. No Choice But War: The United
States Embargo Against
Japan and the Eruption of War in the
Pacific. McFarland, 1995.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #35, World War I, Howard Zinn’s A People’s
History of the United States;broadcast June 30, 2018.

My subject today is WWI. My title is:
The War to Start Wars and Silence Opposition. My chief references are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and
Michael
Kazin’s War Against War.

President Woodrow Wilson had promised
that the US would stay neutral in the war.
But the US was shipping enormous amounts of war material to Germany’s
enemies, which motivated the Germans to sink merchant ships, which Wilson
denounced. The British and the US were
cooperating in other ways. To take a
notorious case, although the US denounced as a monstrous atrocity, Germany’s
sinking the British liner Lusitania with US citizens aboard, the ship was
heavily armed, her manifests were falsified, and the British and American
governments lied about the cargo.

That is, Wilson was looking for
justifications for entering the war on one side, based not on law but upon
historical allegiances, balance of power, and economic pressure.

In 1914 a serious recession had begun in
the US. But by 1915 sales to the Allies were lifting
the US economy, and by April 1917 more than $2 billion worth of goods had been
sold to the Allies through loans at interest.
J. P. Morgan made huge profits, tying the US more closely to an Allied victory.

And the Allies wanted the US in the war. They had lost unimaginable numbers, dead and
wounded. And mutinies in the French Army were
increasing.

But these motives for war against Germany, and there are more, tell only
half the story. The Wilson
administration created possibly the most effective pro-war propaganda and
coercion campaign in all US history. Until
1917 a consensus against war prevailed, but in just a few months Wilson
reversed it.

His genius propagandist was George Creel, who set up a Committee on
Public Information to persuade young men ”to make the world safe for
democracy.” It sponsored 75,000
speakers, who gave 750,000 four-minute speeches in five thousand communities

In addition,a draft was
instituted, with harsh punishment for those who refused. A million men were planned for the “war to
end all wars,” but in the first weeks after the declaration of war only 73,000
volunteered. Then Congress voted for a
draft.

And then in June 1917 Congress passed and
Wilson signed the Espionage Act, that provided penalties up to 20 years in
prison for anyone during war who “shall willfully cause or attempt to cause
insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or
naval forces…or shall willfully obstruct… recruiting or enlistment…” Today the Espionage Act is still the law,
and US wars are multiple and ceaseless.

Soon after the end of the war, most citizens
believed it had not been worth fighting. And its bitter legacy led to the next
world war and the beginning of a surveillance state that still endures
today. 574, 472

References #35

Howard Zinn. A People’s History of the United States

C. Hartley Grattan. Why We Fought. 1929;
repub. 1969.

Adam
Hochschild. To End All Wars. 2011.

Michael Kazin. War Against War.

KPSQ EDITORIAL #34, US Empire, 19th
Century, Howard Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States;broadcast June 23, 2018.

Recent
editorials discussed overpopulation, the military-corporate--congressional
complex, ceaseless war, climate refugees, and collapse of civilization. I’ll turn now to a series of commentaries on the
injustice of the many US wars—the interventions, invasions, occupations. My aim is to promote hope that once the
people of the United States understand that their war taxes have funded wars not
only illegal and immoral but unnecessary, and that those taxes for such wars
diverted money that could have prepared for the climate catastrophe, they will
rise up and end them.

I
will begin just prior to the Spanish-American War. My main sources are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
andGabriel Kolko’s Main Currents in U.S. History. My title is: Where Have All Our Taxes
Gone?

Between 1798 and 1895, the US intervened
in the affairs of other nations 103 times.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 claimed Latin America as under its sphere of
influence. In 1853-4 the US used
warships to force Japan to open its ports to the US, and in 1859 to protect US
interests in Shanghai.

The California Native Americans had been decimated by the
end of the 19th century. Back
eastward, remnants of some 600 Indian nations were being mopped up. In 1890, the year of the massacre at Wounded
Knee, the Bureau of the Census declared the internal frontier closed. The profit system, with its tendency for
expansion, had already begun to look southward and westward, toward Cuba and
the Philippines.

The
Spanish-American War expanded US conquests both south-eastward and
westward. When Cuba revolted from Spain
in 1898, US business and political leaders considered how the island could
solve the disposal of surplus manufactures, and contribute to the building of
the new US commercial empire. Special
economic interests would benefit directly from war: the arms-dealers, the iron
industry, transportation. The richest businessmen—John
Jacob Astor, William Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan-- were feeling militant. And many feared the Cubans would win without
us, producing another black republic in the Caribbean.

On March 27, 1898, President McKinley
presented an ultimatum to Spain that said nothing about independence for
Cuba. The rebels denounced US
intentions to replace Spain, as a declaration of war against the Cuban
revolution. They were right. When McKinley asked Congress for war on April
11, he did not recognize the rebels or ask for Cuban independence.

Upon Spain’s defeat, Cuba became part of
the US sphere, though not a colony.
However, as the result of the war, the US did annex, or colonize,
several other islands Puerto Rico,
belonging to Spain, was taken over by US military forces. Continuing US conquests westward from
Jamestown, the Hawaiian Islands was annexed by joint resolution of Congress in
July of 1898. Wake Island, 2,300 miles
west of Hawaii, on the route to Japan, was occupied. And Guam, the Spanish possession in the
Pacific almost all the way to the Philippines, was taken. And quickly Spain turned over to the US Guam,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines,
for $20 million dollars.

President McKinley said he prayed to
Almighty God night after night over taking the Philippines, until it came to
him it would be cowardly and dishonorable to give them back to Spain.

But the Filipinos did not get the same
message from God. Early in 1899, under
the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, they rose in revolt against US rule. It took the US three years to crush the
rebellion, using 70 thousand troops resulting in thousands of US
casualties. For the Filipinos, from
brutal battles and disease,

the
death rate was enormous.

The
taste of victorious battles, empire, and its racism, paternalism, and profit,
its talk of destiny and civilization, stirred the nation.

Today, by its some 800 foreign military
bases, its wars on 7 nations, and trillion dollars war budget, US military
expansion has become a major source of the CO2 causing the climate catastrophe,
and misdirection of tax funds away from urgent US adaptation to that
catastrophe.

References to #34 on
Spanish-US War

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005, chapter 12.

My main reference
today is the book Dark Age America by
John Greer. Each week I speak the main
idea of a different book on war and warming, economics of untrammeled growth,
overpopulation.

My
title today is: Cultural Collapse and the Future Ahead.

We need
to know how past civilizations have unraveled.
For example, our economic system isn’t benefitting the planet over the
long haul. Name it what you will, the
industrial civilization with its billions of rapidly increasing consumers,
growth, and profits is depleting the earth and has contributed to the climate
catastrophe of extreme weather—rising temperature, increasing floods and fires,
drought and seas rising. Ecologically,
politically, economically, decline is well under way.

More than
four decades ago scientists began warning of the inevitable consequences of
pursuing limitless economic growth on a finite planet. For years, for example, some
biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and
population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal
wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology. We cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot
the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load.

Over four decades ago scientists began
warning of the inevitable consequences of pursuing limitless economic growth in
a finite planet. But the US public,
encouraged by the myth of endless progress and by fossil fuel industry profit,
wanted to continue using three times as much energy per capita as the average
European and twenty times as much as the average Chinese.

Underlying these facts are three hundred
years of industrial expansion which treated the atmosphere as an aerial sewer
for greenhouse gases, and which cashed in the Earth’s cheaply accessible fossil
fuel reserves for a brief interval of abundance so extreme that garbage
collectors in today’s USA have direct access to things emperors could not get
before the Industrial Revolution.

Now 300 years of industrial
contraction and destruction from extreme weather, fierce competition for
resources, and wars are ahead. The
decline and fall of a civilization is not a pleasant prospect, the long passage
through a dark age. But eventually we
can hope for successor societies that will build on our ruins.

"The Ruin" is a realistic elegy in Old English, written probably in the 8th
or 9th century. The poem evokes the former glory of a ruined Roman city. Here are a few
lines:

“Bright were the halls then, many the
bath-houses…

Until Death took away all those brave men….

The city decayed….

Four
centuries from now will elegies about the ruins of our cities be written?

A 19th century poet has an answer
for us today—“In Tenebris II” by Thomas Hardy:

“If way to the Better there be/it exacts a full
look at the Worst.” 544, 472

Extreme weather and wars and
population and unbridled resource extraction are reducing food stocks. Yields from rain-fed farming are being
severely reduced. China and other
countries are purchasing farmland where they can find it. Wall Street food corporations stocks are
soaring.

Hundreds of thousands of desperate people are
forced to flee their homelands where they cannot make a living, and or face
violent death from wars and warlords.
And so at present Africans and Middle Easterners head for Europe,
willing to risk drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, or Latin Americans dying
crossing the Mexican/US border or imprisoned and separated from their
families..

The planet is approaching what some
climatologists call “the climate departure,” the point at which the earth’s
climate begins to cease resembling the past, heat, drought, fire, rain, storm,
flood records are routinely shattered, and what was once considered extreme,
the worst-case scenarios, become the norm.

With over 7 billion people now and
increasing rapidly soon to 9, we face a world already of resource shocks that could
produce a global explosion.

A Pentagon report notes: Picture Japan’s
coastal cities flooded, with their freshwater supplies contaminated. Envision Pakistan, India, and China—all
nuclear powers—skirmishing at their borders over access to shared rivers and
arable land while coastal areas become submerged under rising seas.

And it is all happening so fast there’s
little time to adapt. So how mitigate
the warming, how care for the refugees, without panic and chaos?

Who will defend the planet and the
tides of its desperate people and all species?

We need a rededicated, well-funded
United Nations. All nations together
must embark on a massive global to reduce and reverse population growth, to
reject the economic system of endless growth for profit, to cease warring. Such a commitment must be of the magnitude at
least of WWII mobilization, perhaps also the Marshall Plan, the Apollo Moon,
and Cold War expenditures. We
cannot risk underestimating the realities to come.585, 546, 508, 428

The main
theme of these editorials is the convergence of ceaseless wars, climate
catastrophe, voracious capitalism, and population increase. My title today is: 5 Trillion Dollars Bombing
Rubble. My main source is A Nation Unmade by War by Tom Engelhardt
(2018).

A tiny
group of jihadis attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and George
W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and other ruling warriors reacted with a
“Global War on Terror,” invading and bombing globally.

$5.6
trillion dollars is the cost of the US
war on terror from September 12, 2001 through fiscal year 2018 estimated by
the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
For what? Did
ceaseless war make the US people more secure?
What is sure is that it did enrich
the owners of the military-industrial complex and give jobs to employees of the
US National Security State evermore secure in Washington and spreading around
the globe—the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and the other intelligence
agencies, the US nuclear complex, the Department of Homeland Security, and the
rest of the vast and vastly profitable state within a state.

But this
is only part of the dollar costs. What
about the costs beyond the budget? What
about the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in
Libya, or Marawi in the Philippines destroyed in the War on and of Terror? And by the way murdering bin Laden.

Mile upon mile upon mile of rubble in country
after country. What is the price on
that? What price the children whose
lives were ended or twisted and mangled too horrible to imagine? How
can you put a dollars and cents value on the larger human costs of those wars?

The
hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens
of millions displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across
any border in sight? How factor in the
way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East Africa are
unsettling other parts of the planet?

And seventeen
years after the invasion Afghanistan, and fifteen years after the invasion of
Iraq, how include the costs to our country’s neglected infrastructure, which
has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flowed copiously in what’s laughably called
“national security.” While our leaders
repeated endlessly that the USA was uniquely greater than any empire that ever
existed, they couldn’t find the $5.6 trillion dollars just for starters
necessary for our roads, dams, bridges, tunnels, health care for all, and
paying down the national debt incurred by the wars.

This on a
planet where “extreme weather” is increasingly wreaking havoc on that same
infrastructure, while the leaders of the one superpower, the exceptional nation
USA, distracted by its ruinous wars and the terrorist groups they engender, refuse
to mobilize against the drowning and frying of our world. 472

Title: The United
States military establishment and the arms industry in US culture

The
main subject of my radio editorials is the convergence of ceaseless war, climate
change with extreme weather, population increase, and unbounded capitalism.

President
Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, but he never imagined
how deep the foundation, how wide the reach the US military would become.

My main source
today is The Complex:How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by
Nick Turse, 2008.

In his
farewell speech Eisenhower warned us of the unwarranted influence of the
military and the arms industry; now a thousand of times more entrenched, they
reach into virtually every aspect of US life.
He labeled this pervasive domination the military industrial complex,
and privately added Congress to make a triangle of power. Now we must call the US System the
military-financial—corporate-industrial-technological-entertainment-academic-scientific-media-intelligence-homeland
security-surveillance-national security-imperial complex! In countless, often invisible ways our lives
are wrapped up in the militarized economy

At the
time of Eisenhower’s farewell address, 1961, the Pentagon was spending $23
billion a year for military goods and services.
In 2007 that would equal around $200 billion. In 2007, the Pentagon’s budget was $439 billion. Adding the costs of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the expenditure was over $600 billion. Factoring in all the many related activities
carried out by related agencies, actual US national security spending in 2007
was nearly $1 trillion per year.

Back in
Ike’s day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General
Motors, dominated the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Now they are dwarfed by the sheer number of
contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. By 1970, ten years after Ike’s address, 22
thousand prime contractors did business with the Pentagon. By 2008 that number topped 47,000 with
subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive
conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer
manufacturer Dell to Ace Hardware, AMF bowling alleys, Avis rent-a-car—try to
imagine the size of the total list! The
Pentagon payroll is not only a who’s who of the top companies in the world—IBM,
Ford Motor, Sony, Sara Lee, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart--, but through their
retail outlets to most of the stores in
your town. Just drive around and store
after store is connected to Pentagon contractors—framed photos on Kodak paper,
Budweiser beer, AT&T telephones, Duracell batteries.

After
WWII some Democrats, as a continuation of the full employment during WWII and
an extension of their New Deal of the 1930s, proposed a program of full
employment in which all able-bodied citizens could find work building the
nation’s agriculture, towns and cities, the infrastructure of a thriving nation. That
did not happen; opposition to big affirmative government for the people was too
strong.

But it
did happen in another way: the New Deal
idea of universal employment was militarized.
In his departing speech, Eisenhower warned that the US had built “an
immense military establishment” and “a
permanent arms industry of vast proportions” that imperiled democracy, and he
called on the public to compel the peaceful meshing of that power with liberty.

But by
the time of Eisenhower’s warning, the military-industrial complex was already
entrenched throughout economic and social life, and the public was not up to
the task of reversing or even checking its power, especially in the Cold War
world. Today it’s impossible to think
the public might even consider a change.
The emergence of a Complex of such epic proportions, composed of
thousands and thousands of small town niche contractors, has almost entirely
enveloped US culture, to such an extent few people are aware.

Eisenhower at one point in his farewell did foretell our present
fate. “The total influence—economic,
political, even spiritual—[of the conjunction of the military establishment and
the large arms industry] is felt in every city, every State house, every office
of the Federal government”-- today’s omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly
hidden system of systems that invades all our lives, in which we are all
complicit.

And all of this occurred at the moment when the
planet most needed a new kind of knitting together, at the moment when humanity’s
future was at stake in ways previously unimaginable, thanks to its still
increasing use of fossil fuels. 718

The general subject for
these editorials is the catastrophic convergence of Warming, War, Capitalism,
Population Growth, and Economic Inequality.
My subject today is population, and my main reference is Too Many People: The
Case for Reversing Growth byLindsey Grant (2001).

Politicians, planners and
environmentalists usually treat population growth as an independent variable to
which they must adjust, rather than as a factor that must be changed if a real
solution to wars, climate chaos, and the economic system is to be found.

Data: Global
human population growth amounts
to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1
billion in 1800 to 7.6 billion in 2017. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the
total population at
8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

Replies to the question, what
world population size is compatible with achievement of our goals? depend upon
the goals. For me, it’s a population
size that provides nutrition and health, social and economic compassion and
justice, and adaptability to extreme weather for most people and other animals. Such values are enshrined in the UN’s UDHR,
the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and the Earth Charter.

Given these goals, has the recent growth
of human numbers and economic activity imperiled our well-being, social justice,
and even the natural support systems on which we and other creatures depend? Despite the nearly universal enthusiasm for
endless growth in the US, is it actually a main root of environmental and
social problems, not simply a potential danger?

Given these goals and
regarding the evidence concerning climate chaos, ceaseless war, food and water
scarcity, tillable land shrinkage, chemicals, pollution, growing energy demands
and their threat to living systems, what
world population might be sustainable at a decent standard of living for the
majority of the world’s population? Do
we need to reduce growth or reverse it?

Has the world already
exceeded the limit for that standard two or three generations ago? Many scientists fear that has happened, and
they seek ways to reverse the trend.
Many applaud Europe’s population turnaround. Most will like its economy: population
stabilization and especially reversal will save money.

We are already at war
with the biosphere that supports us. More than any other proposed solution, a
solution on the demand side — population — offers an effective way to
ameliorate the problems inflamed by the great leap from one to 7 billions in 6
centuries.

But the subject is controversial. Ian Angus undertook a refutation in his Too Many People? that acknowledges
population as a major problem but not as much as capitalism and its
profit-obsessed need for infinite growth on a finite planet.

To OMNI’s Climate Book Forum Committee: a shorter version of the
following summary of the article we discussed this afternoon will appear in
KPSQ’s “Folkus” Saturday.

The main source of this editorial is the
article in Sierra Magazine, The Case
for Climate Reparations” by Jason Mark.
The subject of these editorials is the catastrophic convergence of war
and warming, US capitalism, and
over-population..

The
title of this editorial is: Fossil Fuels Corporations Knew Their Harms a Long
Time Ago and Should Be Accountable

What is our fundamental principle for
these assertions? A corporation that
makes a product causing severe harm when used exactly as intended should
shoulder the costs of abating that harm.

For nearly 40 years, the Carbon
Barons—ExxonMobil and other producers of fossil fuels—have been aware that
their products were emitting dangerous greenhouse gases. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the oil
companies’ own in-house scientists had confirmed that CO2 from oil products was
contributing to the green house effect.
As early as 1977, scientists at Exxon warned the company that the use of
fossil fuels should not be encouraged because of the risk they posed.

In 1988 longtime NASA climatologist James
Hansen gave his now famous congressional testimony warning of the dangers of
climate change. That was 30 years
ago. That is, by 1988, the Carbon Barons
knew that global warming could be catastrophic.
Thus they are guilty of fraud and reckless negligence. 1988 is significant for another reason: more than half of all industrial CO2
emissions have occurred since then.

Yet instead of sharing their findings with
the government and the public, the Carbon Barons began a well-orchestrated and
well-documented campaign of deception.
They gave money to think tanks, individual researchers, and advertising
firms to create an atmosphere of uncertainty around climate change, a system of
disinformation already well-practiced by the tobacco companies. A 1998 memo to the American Petroleum
Institute members declared that victory will be achieved when average citizens
believe the science is uncertain.

The campaign was successful. Between 2006 and 2016, the percentage of
Americans who believed humans and fossil corporations were responsible for
global warming decreased even as the scientific proof increased. And during the last 20 years, ExxonMobil has
broken U.S. records for corporate earnings:
$32 billion in 2014.

On January 10, 2018, New York City announced it
was divesting its holdings in fossil fuel corporations and was filing a lawsuit against five Carbon
Barons—ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell—seeking to
recover damages from Hurricane Sandy as well as the costs for sea level rise
adaptation. The NY suit was the 8th
local US government to hold the Carbon Barons legally accountable.

The lawsuits rest on tort law surrounding
product liability and the polluter pays principle. The suits claim that the Carbon Barons failed
to disclose the dangers of fossil fuel combustion which they have been aware of
since the 1980s, or at the very least since 1994, when the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change went into effect.
They argued also that the Carbon
Barons sought to meet the shareholder’s expectations of profit instead of the
wellbeing of the public.

Thus the suits demand that because the corporate
Carbon Barons are uniquely culpable they should be held accountable. They
are guilty not only of failing to use their early knowledge about climate
change to prevent harm, but they possessed the scientific awareness, the
economic might, and the political influence to have avoided climate chaos, and
they chose not to.

[ Simultaneously, global population continues
to explode and create conflict, and corporate War Barons and their agencies
received trillions of dollars of public funds to threaten, invade, bomb, and
occupy a dozen nations.]

The first US government recognition of and
assistance to internally displaced climate refugees occurred in 2016. I drew from several books
for today, including Joseph Romm, Climate
Change (2018). My theme for all of these editorials is war
and warming.

Climate Refugees: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana

“Perhaps the modern era’s first climate
refugees were the five hundred thousand Bangladeshis left homeless when half of
Bhola Island flooded in 2005.” At least officially, the first US climate
refugees were recognized in 2016. In
that year the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $52 million
to help members of the Louisiana Isle de Jean Charles Band of
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians relocate their disappearing community. In 1955, the Isle de Jean Charles comprised
more than 22,000 acres. Today only 320
acres remain, more than 98 percent lost to the seas.

This was a momentous governmental decision
with sweeping implications. If these
victims of climate change can be resettled with taxpayer funding, why not
others in Louisiana, or in other states?
Where will the money come from? After
all, “over 75 percent of the ocean shoreline of the United States is
disappearing.” We are very late in
responding with mitigation and adaptation.
Why is that? We are just now officially recognizing the
need because of 2 decades of corporate disinformation, denial, and coverup. And the warfare state garners over a trillion
dollars annually.

War Refugees

The stage was set for the long
neglect of coastal ruin—the failure to mitigate and adapt to warming--by the pathologies of Cold War militarism and neoliberal
capitalism. Over the last forty years ,
both of these forces have distorted our government’s relationship to its
citizens. The Cold War sowed instability throughout the Third World and left a
legacy of armed groups, cheap weapons, smuggling networks, corrupted officialdoms,
and masses of people fleeing for their lives.
For example, Somalia was destroyed by Cold War military
interventions. In economics radical
privatization and economic deregulation
have pushed many countries into extreme inequality and permanent crisis. In the US, beginning in the 1980s, our
leaders increasingly removed and undermined the state’s affirmative regulatory
and redistributive functions, and transferred those functions to police
repression, replacing caring by punishment, and this process has accelerated
under President Trump. Until now our
chief response to refugees is expelling and putting up walls. Climate change now joins these crises, acting
as an accelerant.

Climate/War Refugees: Syria

Climate
change and war do a dance. Climate change, extreme weather increases
group violence, civil war, and national war, and those conflicts increase food
and water shortages, pandemic disease, poverty, hunger, which increase violence
and war. Climate change makes violent conflict more
likely and that violence makes a nation more vulnerable to climate change.

Syria
is a dramatic contemporary example. Climate
change was a major trigger of Syria’s brutal civil war. From 2006 to 2010 the worst extended drought
and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in
the Fertile Crescent spawned the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). The drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000
people and sent vastly more into poverty, displacement, and flight, which
created the unrest that exploded in spring 2011. That is, climate change caused agricultural
collapse and mass migration, which led to widespread discontent and the
uprising and the civil war. And brutal
multi-year droughts are likely to become the norm, with similar consequences.

The most colossal set of events in human
history is occurring: the catastrophic convergence of climate change and
extreme weather, global violence, unceasing wars, and poverty. A recent study projects that 700 million
climate related refugees will be on the move by 2050. 614

Just how bad are things with
Donald Trump in the White House? And what does having a racist, misogynist,
xenophobic and erratic president who continues to enjoy unquestionable support
from his base tell us about the state of US politics and the dangers to the
future of democracy in the US and in the world on the whole? Noam Chomsky
shares his thoughts on these and other related questions in an exclusive
interview with C. J. Polychroniou for Truthout.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, it's
been already 14 months into Donald Trump's turbulent White House tenure, but
sometimes we still need to pinch ourselves to make sure that it's not a
nightmare that a racist, misogynist, homophobic man who apparently cares only
about himself runs the world's most powerful nation. But, really, how bad is it
having Trump in the White House?

Very bad. As Trump began his
second year in office, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advanced their
Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, citing increasing concerns over
nuclear weapons and climate change. That's the closest it has been to terminal
disaster since 1953, when the US and USSR exploded thermonuclear weapons. That
was before the release of Trump's Nuclear Posture Review, which significantly
increases the dangers by lowering the threshold for nuclear attack and by
developing new weapons that increase the danger of terminal war.

On climate change, Trump is a
complete disaster, along with the entire Republican leadership. Every candidate
in the Republican primaries either denied that what is happening is happening
or said ... we shouldn't do anything about it. And these attitudes infect the
Republican base. Half of Republicans deny that global warming is taking place,
while 70 percent say that whether it is or not, humans are not responsible.
Such figures would be shocking anywhere, but are remarkably so in a developed
country with unparalleled resources and easy access to information.

It is hard to find words to
describe the fact that the most powerful country in world history is not only
withdrawing from global efforts to address a truly existential threat, but is
also dedicating itself to accelerating the race to disaster, all to put more
dollars in overstuffed pockets. No less astounding is the limited attention
paid to the phenomenon.

ABOVE IS THE FULLER VERSION
WITH REFS 600+ WORDS. THE FOLLOWING IS
THE RADIO SCRIPT OF UNDER 500 WORDS, 5 min. 30 sec.

Title:
Climate, War, and Refugees

The first US government recognition of and
assistance to internally displaced climate refugees occurred in 2016. I drew from several books for today, including Joseph Romm, Climate Change (2018). My theme for all of these editorials is war
and warming.

Climate Refugees: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana

“Perhaps the modern era’s first climate
refugees were the five hundred thousand Bangladeshis left homeless when half of
Bhola Island flooded in 2005.” At
least officially, the first US climate refugees were recognized in 2016. In that year the Dept. of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) awarded $52 million to help members of the Louisiana Isle de
Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians relocate their
disappearing community. In 1955, the
Isle de Jean Charles comprised more than 22,000 acres. Today only 320 acres remain, more than 98
percent lost to the seas.

This was a momentous governmental decision
with sweeping implications. If these
victims of climate change can be resettled with taxpayer funding, why not
others in Louisiana, or in other states?
Where will the money come from?
After all, “over 75 percent of the ocean shoreline of the United States
is disappearing.”

War Refugees

The stage was set for the long neglect of coastal ruin—the
failure to mitigate and adapt to warming--by the pathologies of Cold War militarism and
neoliberal capitalism. For example,
Somalia was destroyed by Cold War military interventions. The Cold War sowed instability throughout the
Third World and left a legacy of armed groups, cheap weapons, smuggling
networks, corrupted officialdoms, and masses of people fleeing for their
lives. In economics radical
privatization and economic deregulation
have pushed many countries into extreme inequality and permanent crisis. In the US, our chief response to refugees is
expelling and putting up walls. Climate
change now joins these crises.

Climate/War Refugees: Syria

Climate
change and war do a dance. Climate change, extreme weather,
increases group violence, civil war, and national war, and those conflicts
increase food and water shortages, pandemic disease, poverty, hunger, which
increase violence and war. Climate
change makes violent conflict more likely and that violence makes a nation more
vulnerable to climate change.

Syria is a dramatic contemporary
example. Climate change was a major
trigger of Syria’s brutal civil war.
From 2006 to 2010 the worst extended drought and most severe set of crop
failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent spawned
the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS).
The drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000 people and sent vastly
more into poverty, displacement, and flight, which created the unrest that
exploded in spring 2011.

The most colossal set of events in human
history is occurring: the catastrophic convergence of increasing population, extreme
weather, unceasing wars, poverty, and global violence. A recent study projects that 700 million
climate related refugees will be on the move by 2050. 475

In his speech “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” at the Naval
Academy on Nov. 30, 2005, President Bush used the word “victory” 15 times. Meanwhile, cities around the world were increasingly
threatened by climate chaos.

In 1991, after a half-century of Soviet Union and United States—mirror
images SU and US-- planet-endangering, planning and threatening nuclear war, SU
collapsed. The US was militarily and economically triumphant. The US, stood alone as the Great Super-Power,
the global sheriff, challenged by no terrestrial frontiers. Such a colossus, its leaders dazzled by such
military power, inevitably confirmed its power by expanding its conquests over
its puny post-Cold War global opponents: Panama, Iraq War I, Afghanistan, El
Salvador, Haiti, and the US bombed Syria a few days ago. Even more inevitable, and beginning before
the collapse of SU, the US was preparing for war in outer-space, the last
frontier to conquer and occupy.

This US Wall Street-Capitalism-White House-Pentagon-Congress-Mainstream
Media, will to dominate the world, has scarcely considered the global warming
rushing toward catastrophe; to the
contrary, the US has much denied the overwhelming evidence. Cities house the majority of humanity; most
megacities are in coastal zones threatened by sea level rise; urbanites are
particularly vulnerable to deadly heat waves by the “heat island” effect; and
inequality continues to spiral. Yet how cities cope with inequalities of race,
class, and gender determines how well it will weather the increasingly extreme
storms bearing down upon them. After hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, residents
of coastal cities, especially the poor, wait anxiously for the next superstorm,
fearing the sea walls and pumps will again be inadequate, because individuals, city
and state governments, and the national government are deeply in debt already
to the last superstorms.

Thousands in the US alone are already displaced. Fayetteville, AR, houses refugees from Katrina. Coastal communities throughout the US are
threatened by sea level rise caused by global warming, and the displaced are
not prepared for, budgets everywhere stretched thin even in wealthy, but
unequal, US. And countless
neighborhoods, towns, and nations, because they chose less rather than more
planning, and unprepared for the coming catastrophe.

Climate change and violent conflict go In both directions. Violent conflict increases vulnerability to
extreme weather. Violent conflict
absorbs money and harms a6ssets that facilitate adaptation, including infrastructures,
institutions, natural resources, and jobs.
In the other direction, climate change makes violent conflict more
likely, which makes a population and the land more vulnerable. Thus climate change creates more and more of
the most dangerous places on Earth: failed cities and nations.

Anthropogenic superstorms are dramatically invading cities while the
horrific convergence of urbanization, climate change, and war seems invisible
to our Super-Power leaders in the White House and Congress who prefer to grow
big-business neo-liberal urban policies and to invade and dominate the world, instead of providing affirmative, caring
government for all. 497

References to #26

Ashley
Dawson. Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age
of Climate Change. (2017).

Tom
Engelhardt. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the
Disillusioning of a
Generation. (1995/2007).

William Blum. Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. 1986; 1995 (new chapters 50-53, 55); 2004
(new chapter 56 “The American Empire: 1992 to Present”).

Emmalina Glinskis. “After the Flood: Debt.” The
Nation (Ap 23, 2018).

END #26
600 words

I read the above for KPSQ but I created
the following shorter version if needed.

Title:
Imperial Victory versus Cities

In his speech “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” at the Naval
Academy on Nov. 30, 2005, President Bush used the word “victory” 15 times. Meanwhile, cities around the world were increasingly
threatened by climate chaos.

In 1991, after a half-century of Soviet Union and United States—mirror
images SU and US-- planet-endangering, planning and threatening nuclear war, SU
collapsed. The US was militarily and economically triumphant. The US, stood alone as the Great Super-Power,
the global sheriff, challenged by no terrestrial frontiers. Such a colossus, its leaders dazzled by such
military power, inevitably confirmed its power by expanding its conquests over
its puny post-Cold War global opponents: Panama, Iraq War I, Afghanistan, El
Salvador, Haiti, and the US bombed Syria a few days ago. Even more inevitable, and beginning long before
the collapse of SU, the US was preparing for war in outer-space, the last
frontier to conquer and occupy.

This US Wall Street Capitalism-White House-Pentagon-Congress-Mainstream
Media, will to dominate the world, has scarcely considered the global warming
rushing toward catastrophe; to the
contrary, the US has much denied the overwhelming evidence. After hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, residents
of coastal cities, especially the poor, wait anxiously for the next superstorm,
fearing the sea walls and pumps will again be inadequate, because individuals, city
and state governments, and the national government are deeply in debt already
to the last superstorms. And countless
neighborhoods, towns, and nations, because they chose less rather than more
planning, are unprepared for the coming catastrophe.

Climate change and violent conflict go In both directions. Violent conflict increases vulnerability to
extreme weather. Violent conflict
absorbs money and harms assets that facilitate adaptation, including infrastructures,
institutions, natural resources, and jobs.
In the other direction, climate change makes violent conflict more
likely, which makes a population and the land more vulnerable. Thus climate change creates more and more of
the most dangerous places on Earth: failed cities and nations.

Anthropogenic superstorms are dramatically invading cities while the
horrific convergence of urbanization, climate change, and war seems invisible
to our Super-Power leaders in the White House and Congress who prefer to grow
big-business, neo-liberal urban policies and to invade and dominate the world, instead of providing affirmative, caring
government for all. 396

Diana Johnstone, “Doomsday
Postponed?” in Paul Johnstone, From MAD
to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (2017), pp. 276- Seymour Chwast. At War
with War (2017).

Title: Nuclear
War and the Planet

During
the Cold War,awareness of the overwhelming
extent of mutually sustained damages during a nuclear war between Russia and
the United States led to agreements to lessen the possibility of nuclear
decimation of the planet during the Cold War.
My main references today are found inFrom
MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear
War Planning by Paul Johnstone. 2017. Paul Craig Roberts wrote the “Foreword”
(2016) (8-14), and Diana Johnstone’s 2 commentaries: “The Dangerous Seduction
of Absolute Power” (15-30) and the interrogative “Doomsday Postponed?” (272-286).

Today the situation is far more dangerous than during the Cold War
period. From the Soviet collapse in 1991 came the
belligerent warfare doctrine of US world hegemony. For example, Moscow’s acceptance of the
reunification of Germany in exchange for the promise that US/NATO would not
move farther east resulted in US/NATO breaking the promise and ringing Russia’s
border with military bases.

The
old US anti-Communist obsession evolved from Sovietphobia into Russophobia during
over a century of threat and fear mongering. Today, demonization of President
Putin keeps the wheels of the US economy whirring”-- the Military-Industrial
complex thrives, people find employment, stockholders get their cut, and
Congress members enjoy their campaign donations, and the US national debt rises.

In contrast to the Soviet Union, the US has
always maintained its “right” to carry out a nuclear first strike. This policy was reaffirmed in 2016 by
Pentagon Secretary Ashton Carter. “That’s
our doctrine now, and we don’t have any intention of changing that doctrine,”
he emphasized.

But that’s
no deterrence. Given the great advantage
to the side that strikes first, this policy is an enormous incentive to the
other side to strike first in a crisis.
Faced with an aggressive trillion dollars US buildup in tactical nuclear
weapons, as initiated by President Obama, coupled with a first strike policy, a
potential adversary might panic and attack.

Nuclear war would devastate the planet and alter the climate.

In a U.S.-Russia war hundreds or even
thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would
be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees
Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen
during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the
stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis,
causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological
disruption. The effect would be similar to that of the giant
meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This
time, we would be the dinosaurs.

North Korea would most certainly “lose” a
nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die. Such vast
damage would be wrought in Korea, Japan and Pacific island territories (such as
Guam) that any “victory” wouldn’t deserve the name. Not only would that region
be left with horrible suffering amongst the survivors; it would also
immediately face famine and rampant disease. Radioactive fallout from such a
war would spread around the world, including to the U.S. Later, this fallout
would cause genetic mutations in plants, animals and human beings, as it has in
the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Conclusion

US
world domination is unattainable. The
quest for absolute domination leads to absolute destruction. Or we could work for the first time to build
a peaceful international structure with other nations as partners, rather than
as vassals or enemies. Working seriously for nuclear disarmament
would be the basis of a new world order based on cooperation rather than fear.

Let
us imagine what the world would be like today if the enormous effort for
nuclear war had been directed toward finding ways to understand the enemy. Arkansas’ former Senator Fulbright appealed
for empathy during the 1960s and ‘70s. Seeing others as part of a human community, he
wrote, guides us away from parochialism and nationalism and extermination.
660

SHORTENED FINAL SCRIPT

Title:
Nuclear War and the Planet, Dick Bennett
April 21, 2018

During
the Cold War,awareness of the madness of a
nuclear war between Russia and the United States led to agreements to lessen
the possibility of nuclear decimation of the planet. My main references today are found inFrom MAD to
Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning by Paul Johnstone. 2017. Paul Craig Roberts wrote the “Foreword”
(2016) (8-14), and Diana Johnstone wrote 2 commentaries: “The Dangerous
Seduction of Absolute Power” (15-30) and “Doomsday Postponed?” (272-286).

Today the situation is far more dangerous than during the Cold War
period. From the Soviet collapse in 1991 came the
belligerent warfare doctrine of US world hegemony. For example, Moscow’s acceptance of the
reunification of Germany in exchange for the promise that US/NATO would not
move farther east, resulted in US/NATO breaking the promise and ringing
Russia’s border with military bases.

The
old US anti-Communist obsession evolved from Sovietphobia into Russophobia
during over a century of threat and fear mongering. Today, demonization of
President Putin keeps the wheels of the US economy whirring-- the
Military-Industrial complex thrives, people find employment, CEOs and
stockholders get rich, Congress members enjoy their campaign donations, and the
US national debt rises.

In
contrast to the Soviet Union, the US has always claimed its “right” to carry
out a nuclear first strike. This policy
was reaffirmed in 2016 by Pentagon Secretary Ashton Carter. “That’s our doctrine now, and we don’t have
any intention of changing that doctrine,” he emphasized.

But nuclear
war would devastate the planet and alter the climate.

In a U.S.-Russia war hundreds or even
thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would
be catastrophic: global average temperatures could drop as much as 12 degrees
Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen
during the great ice ages.

North Korea would most certainly “lose” a
nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die.

Conclusion

US
world domination is unattainable. The
quest for world domination will lead to world destruction.

But
we have an alternative, as advocated by former Arkansas Senator J. William
Fulbright. We could work to build a
peaceful international structure with other nations as partners, rather than as
vassals or enemies. Working seriously
for nuclear disarmament would be the basis of a new world order based on
cooperation rather than fear.

Let
us imagine what the world would be like today if the enormous effort for
nuclear war had been directed toward finding ways to understand the enemy. Senator Fulbright appealed for empathy during
the 1960s and ‘70s. Seeing others as
part of a human community, he wrote, guides us away from parochialism,
nationalism, and extermination. Read his books, The Arrogance of Power, The Price of Empire.459

J. William Fulbright, The Price of Empire. 1989.
Chap. 7, “Seeing the World as Others See It.” Afterword: Changing Our Manner of Thinking.”

END #25

#24 Saturday
April 14, radio editorial presentation (DELAYED FROM APRIL 7)

Gar Smith, The War and Environment Reader (2018)

Title of Editorial: US Militarism, Serial Wars, and Global
Warming

Even
before war breaks out, the Earth suffers.
Its minerals, chemicals, and fuels are torn from the Earth’s plains and
hills and forests, and transformed into bombers and bullets that further crater
and sear and poison the land. My
chief reference today is The War and
Environment Reader by Gar Smith (2017).

As the Palace Guard of the most expansive
empire in world history, the Pentagon’s operations impose unparalleled
environmental impacts on the planet. The
United States maintains tens of thousands of troops stationed at more than
1,000 bases in more than 60 foreign countries.
To put it another way: the Pentagon’s 2010 global empire included more
than 539,000 facilities, at nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million
acres. With the world’s largest air
force and naval fleets, the Pentagon is the world’s greatest institutional
consumer of oil, burning 320,000 barrels of oil a day, Not including military contractors
or weapons producers.

Entire generations have grown up in a culture
of war of endless wars. The Pentagon,
Congress, and White House, the corporations, the big banks, mainstream media, even
most of the religions are militarized, and all together--the
military-industrial complex--spin and conspire to defend and even glamorize
weapons, bombings, killings.

It
should come as no surprise therefore that war has become one of USA’s biggest
exports. The grim truth is that war is
“good for business.” In 2015, of the
hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons sold in the world, US
corporations grabbed 56%.

With
so much of our wealth going to war, it is again no surprise that eight rich men
control as much wealth as 3.6 billion of the world’s poorest. Were the Pentagon’s 2016 budget
redistributed, Lockheed Martin’s underperforming F-35 fighter could have
allowed the National School Lunch Program to feed 31 million US children—one-fifth
of them malnourished--for 24 years. Yet
our leaders continue to feed Pentagon contractors, including $1 trillion to
modernize nuclear bombs in violation of
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Armies
commanded by generals target the earth’s land, seas, and air for control. Armies of capital, of wealth, stalk the globe
in search of plunder and profit. The two
predators are inseparable—the generals to seize the biosphere, the corporations
to exploit and commodify it.

At the expense of nature, cities rise and
sprawl as forests and wetlands shrink.
Biodiverse wildlands are transformed into chemically addicted
monocultures. Oil, --burned
to warm and cool homes, to propel aircraft, vessels, and vehicles--, is
exhausted into the atmosphere. As the
air and oceans grow hotter, coral nations and coastal cities disappear under
rising seas, and polar ice fields, crumble and collapse. Growth at all costs, succeeded by climate
change, drought and floods, succeeded by unprecedented refugees.

And
all contributing to unrest and conflict and civil war driving desperate people
to the sinking cities.

“But
it doesn’t have to be that way,” friends sing their hopeful song. We do not lack strategies for a more
peaceful, just, and ecological world. Organizations
are already putting those strategies into action, like OMNI, and as listed by
Gar Smith. And they are inviting you to join
with them. 584
words

References

Gar
Smith, The War and Environment Reader (2018).

Related:

John
Dower, The Violent American Century (2017).

Tom
Engelhardt, Shadow Government (2011,
2014). Esp. see Ch. 9,

“Destroying the Planet for Record
Profits” on ecocide and “terrarists.”

Editorial Title: Corporate CEOs, Government Leaders, and
Crimes Against Humanity.

The global human population is projected
by the FAO to reach more than 9 billion by 2050, meaning that about 50% more food will be required.
Yet, as climate change and extreme weather deepen, so will lack of
available food and water.

My
main reference today is Unprecedented
Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival by Peter Carter
and Elizabeth Woodworth.

The UN reported in September 2017 that
world hunger is rising again, driven by wars and climate change, which often go
hand in hand. Nobody doubts that severe
economic and political dislocation, followed by strife and war, will take place
if the world becomes a much hungrier place.
And nobody doubts that facing the crisis now by transitioning to renewable energy as quickly as
possible—like NOW—will be much less destructive than the inevitable climate
wars if we fail to come to grips.

Most people know who is to blame and most
people know what to do—especially, applying a carbon tax on fossil fuels and stopping
the trillions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies. In
Northwest Arkansas the chapter of Climate Change Lobby, supported by the OMNI
Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology, is putting pressure on the government
to achieve both goals. But our fossil
fuels companies, resolute in squeezing all the profit out of the remaining oil,
owns both Parties and spreads disinformation, while global emissions of CO2 and
other greenhouse gasses have increased by 30% since 1992, and average
temperature continues to rise.

High-CO2-emitting nations have declined to
act upon the science, and have ignored the pleas of NGOs representing the
people. In June 2014, the Climate
Action Network International, representing over 90 organizations in over 100
countries, presented at the UN climate negotiations. They called for an end to the fossil fuel
era. By cutting emissions to zero before
2050, and by an accelerated transition to a 100% renewable energy future, a
global warming limit of 1.5 degree C is
possible

Yet the national governments most guilty
of CO2 emissions continue to sacrifice our survival, and the survival of all
future generations for fossil fuel corporate profits that include untold oil
for military operations subsidized by our money.

So? how to compel a carbon tax and
removal of subsidies?

First, we must recognize that climate science denial is the worst crime against
humanity.

The fossil fuel
industry has led climate change denial via massive disinformation, which is defined as “false information deliberately
and often covertly spread in order to influence public opinion or obscure the
truth.” A crime against humanity

is “a deliberate act, typically as part of a
systematic campaign that causes human suffering or death on a large scale.”

This means that corporate officials and
investors and individual owners of fossil fuel industries, and government
officials of high CO2-emitting countries, who have allowed the atmospheric CO2
to rise to 407 ppm, where it is today—the highest CO2 in millions of years--,
that risks a temperature rise to catastrophic 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, have
committed crimes against humanity.

That is, ArchCoal, BP, Chevron,
ConocoPhillips, Consol Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody, and Shell, and their agents
like The Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers, and their paid politicians,
especially including those of the United States, are guilty of crimes against
humanity. For they knew the consequences of excessive CO2 by the 1980s and spent
billions of dollars to prevent the public from knowing and taking action.

So many days are beautiful in the
Ozarks, it’s difficult to believe we—the people, the leaders, the economic
system--have damaged the Earth—its atmosphere, its soil, its oceans--perhaps irreparably.
Yet our scientists have been telling us for over 40 years. So why
is the atmosphere still getting hotter, the weather becoming more extreme, the
oceans rising and more acidic? My main reference today is Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War byRosalie Bertellpublished
in 2001.Yes Rosalie
fully knew the score by 2001.

At least since the United Nations
Conference on the Environment in 1972, 46 years ago, Earthlings
have known, or been able to know, that the average temperature was rising, forests
dying or clear-cut, species becoming extinct, drinking water contaminated and
depleted, soil eroding, smog and poverty worsening, while population grew faster
and faster. More recently—i.e., during
the 1980s and 1990s, violent weather increased at an alarming rate, AND we
learned that many so-called natural disasters are human-made.

A lot of people were
aware and have worked hard to stop these degradations. The environmental slogan—reduce, reuse,
recycle—was popular by the 1960s.

Why then in September 1999, 19
years ago, did the UN Environment Program announce again that the
environmental crisis was deepening, not
receding? ?Why have all of our efforts to protect and restore
the health of the planet by reusing, recycling, and reducing, not stemmed the
tide-- an apt metaphor, since coastal cities world-wide are now being flooded?

Yes people like to drink
water from billions of bottles made from fossil fuel.

Annual spending on bottled water in the
U.S. in 2017 was

$12,725,000,000.

Global sales revenue from bottled water
was

$75,000,000,000

And yes many of our political and corporate
leaders took the cash and denied the warming. We know this. Yet the crisis deepens.

So let us go deeper. Let’s consider that we have been treating symptoms instead of causes.
One enormous source of abuse that has increased in frequency since the
1940s has been US wars and preparations for wars. Wars result not only in immediate deaths of
humans, but thousand-fold other species of fauna and flora. And wars attack not only species but soil
and air and water, and through them the climate itself, with consequences
lasting hundreds to thousands of years.
And not only war itself undermines our life-support system, but also the
research and development, the military exercises and general preparations for
battle that are carried out on a daily basis in most parts of the world, where
we have 800 military bases. All in the
name of a paranoid concept of “security” enthusiastically embraced by the
military industrial complex.

Blowing up a nation or
a region because a major criminal lives there, contaminating a nation’s food, air,
water, and land as a means of achieving justice and peace, are surely not ways to create either, but surely do increase climate change, big time. Instead of sixty years of war-war, we could
have promoted harmony by nonviolent methods.
Instead of military security for the military economy building and
sustaining 19 aircraft carriers, 18 Trident submarineswith their ballistic
and cruise missiles, and another drone base at Ft. Smith, we might
have relieved conflicts arising from rapid population increases and poverty.

While pursuing the
economic bottom line through military domination, we lost the crucial struggle
to protect Earth’s restorative power.

Despite all the denial
and disinformation from many corporate and political leaders, today the
majority of our millennials consider warming our main threat. I give thanks to them and from them I hope
will arise a network of global thinkers and planners who will transform our
institutions nonviolently to save our civilization and human other species. Particularly, we need a new job description
for the Pentagon.

My main reference today is
the book by Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, A Climate of Conflict: The Links between Climate Change, Peace and War.

Roughly
three kinds of books have been written about wars and warming: 1. War and its
consequences causing warming, 2. Warming and its consequences causing wars, and
3. Integration of the two processes.
This book concentrates on the second: warming, i.e. weather extremes and
their consequences producing conflicts.

Climate
change is upon us and its physical effects have started to unfold Growing strains on ecosystems translate
directly into national, regional and global security threats. Pollution,
desertification, scarcity of fresh water, changing weather patterns resulting
in floods, storms, etc, cause food insecurity and population displacements,
which may lead to political instability and violent conflicts. These, in turn,
risk setting back development by decades. Two-thirds of the world’s population
live in countries that are at high risk of instability as a consequence of
climate change. Many of the countries predicted to be worst affected by climate
change are also affected, or threatened, by violent conflicts. The very poor
are hit the hardest. Climate change also impacts on regional and global
economic patterns, with new risks for investors and corporations.

Consequently, the need for social,
environmental, political and economic stability must go hand in hand. Tackling
the challenges of climate change must include a holistic perspective of state-
and human security. A great leap in awareness and preparedness is needed on the
part of organizations, businesses, public officials and state agencies.

Climate, poverty, governance: To understand how the effects of climate
change will interact with socio-economic and political problems in poorer
countries means tracing the consequences of consequences. This process
highlights three key elements of risk – political instability, economic
weakness, food insecurity. Each alone
can produce large-scale displacement of refugees. And large-scale displacement carries high
risk of conflict because of the fearful reactions it often receives and the
inflammatory politics that often greet it.

Countries at risk: Many of the world’s poorest countries and
communities thus face a double-headed problem: that of climate change and
violent conflict. Climate change is
already compounding the propensity for violent conflict in these countries,
which in turn will leave communities poorer, less resilient and less able to
cope with the consequences of climate change. There are 46 countries in which the effects of climate change
interacting with economic, social and political problems will create a high
risk of violent conflict.

There
is a second group of 56 countries where the
institutions of government will have great difficulty taking the strain of
climate change on top of all their other current challenges. In these
countries, though the risk of armed conflict may not be so immediate, the
interaction of climate change and other factors creates a high risk of
political instability, with potential violent conflict a distinct risk in the
longer term.

It is too late to believe the situation
can be made safe solely by reducing carbon emissions worldwide in order to
mitigate climate change. Those measures are essential for our great-great
grandchildren, but their effects will only be felt with time. What is required
now is for states and communities to adapt to handle the challenges of climate
change NOW.

These global realities explain why the
United States is so much needed in the world.
Most of the countries that face the double-headed problem of climate
change and violent conflict cannot be expected to take on the task of
adaptation alone. Some of them lack the will, more lack the capacity, and some
lack both. What is required is international cooperation to support local
action, both as a way of strengthening international security and to achieve
the global goals of sustainable development. Without dropping or downplaying the
long-range goals of mitigation, the
US needs to significantly increase its energy and resources that are focused on
adaptation. Against estimated global costs of adaptation
that range from $10-40 billion, the resources currently available amount to
only a billion. At the same time as adaptation must receive
more emphasis and more funding, it matters even more that it is the right kind
of adaptation and that money is spent in the right way. A different approach is possible, based on
peacebuilding, engaging local communities’ energies in a social process to work
out how to adapt to climate change and how to handle conflicts as they arise,
so that they do not become violent.

Adaptation and
peacebuilding: The double-headed problem of climate change
and violent conflict thus has a unified
solution – peacebuilding and adaptation are effectively the same kind of
activity. At the same time as adaptation to climate change can and must be made
conflict-sensitive, peacebuilding and development must be made
climate-sensitive. A society that can develop adaptive strategies for climate
change in this way is well equipped to avoid armed conflict. And a society that
can manage conflicts and major disagreements over serious issues without a high
risk of violence is well equipped to adapt successfully to the challenge of
climate change. 1174/847

References

Dan Smith and Janani
Vivekananda. A Climate of Conflict: The Links between Climate Change, Peace and War. 2007.

EDITORIAL #20 (Saturday March 10,
broadcast date).War and Warming.Christian Parenti.Tropic
of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011).Original
draft of 988 words.See below for
shortened radio version.

Title: This is Dick Bennett with War and
Warming editorial #20.My title:The Catastrophic Convergence of Wars, US
Neo-Liberal economics, and Warming

The subject of these editorials is war and
warming, and I turn now to several emphasizing warming.My chief source today is Christian Parenti’s book Tropic
of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.

Climate change is happening, and its consequences are
everywhere experienced by increasing and increasingly extreme weather events: heat,
desertification, agricultural disruption, hurricanes, ocean acidification,
melting glaciers, rising sea levels, coastal inundations. These roots of human conflict are being experienced
around the world, causing more civil and cross-border wars and more refugees,
and more species extinctions.

Sea levels are already among the world’s climate
change related greatest stresses, and are estimated to rise an average of 5
feet over the next 90 years.Such
heights will lead to massive dislocations.One study projected that 700 million climate refugees will be on the
move by 2050. The modern era’s first
massive climate refugees were the five hundred thousand Bangladeshis made
homeless when half of Bhola Island flooded in 2005.In Bangladesh an estimated 22 million people
will be forced from their homes by 2050 because of climate change.

India has almost completed a militarized
border fence along its 2,500-mile frontier with Bangladesh, and Hindu anti-immigrant
forces are agitating to deport refugee Bangladeshi.

Meanwhile, twenty-two Pacific Island
nations, home to 7 million people, are planning for relocation as rising seas
threaten them with national annihilation.Where will they go, and how will they be received?

In the United States, also building a wall
against Latin Americans, What will happen when its coastal cities flood?

Globally, What chaos and violence will
result when Shanghai, New York City, London, and Tokyo are under water?

Climate change arrives in a world already
in crisis.The current and impending
dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of
ceaseless wars and endemic poverty. It’s a catastrophic
convergence of political, economic, and environmental disasters.

The Pentagon calls climate change a
“threat multiplier.”All across the
planet, extreme weather and water scarcity escalate existing social and
international conflicts.There are some
46 countries—home to some 3 billion people—in which effects of climate change, interacting
with political problems, create a high expectation of internal and cross-border
wars.

US and western military planners recognize
a world of civil war, refugees, pogroms, and social breakdown.But instead of building a caring, rescuing world,
the US particularly, President Trump’s 2018 budget, provides $700 billion for a
global, open-ended, violent counterinsurgency.

Resistance:

Political adaptation means transforming human
relationships from their present violence, to new peaceful relationships
including economic redistribution and diplomacy instead of militarism.

We need a new metaphor for our
crisis.Now US leaders and their
followers see themselves as in an armed lifeboat
responding to climate change by arming, excluding, neglecting, repressing,
policing, and killing.Our lifeboat is
the wealthiest and best built and armed, and several more intend to survive
similarly.All other lifeboats descend
in quality toward chaos; many are leaking; some are sinking.

But will this adaptation be
successful?Will not the collapse of the
Global South take us all down?If
climate change is allowed to destroy whole economies and nations, will walls,
guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, permanently deployed mercenaries, or
nuclear bombs save us?

References #20, March 10:

Christian Parenti. Tropic
of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.2011.Chapters 1 and 2, Notes pp. 246-7.

Related:

Cleo Paskal.Global Warring: How Environmental,
Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map.2010.

Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda.A
Climate of Conflict: The Links Between Climate Change and War.2008.

My last editorial dealt with the
environmental costs of militarism. My
subject today is two of the many obstacles to public acceptance of the
scientific facts of global warming.
First, the anti-science deniers of climate warming. They are of several kinds, among them: the officers of organizations and front
groups established by corporations or wealthy individuals to confuse the
public; the media talking heads, public relations mercenaries, and politicians
who serve as accomplices; and the media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for business
as usual propaganda. I will identify
some of the politicians. The second
obstacle to public understanding is the enormous diversion of tax money to the
US empire for oil, rationalized by fear mongering. The additional costs of warming to warring
make the subject of warming doubly repugnant to a financially stressed populace,
and the massive fearmongering by the Pentagon and its warrior allies of foreign
“terrorists” everywhere wanting to hurt us, reinforces the people’s evasion of
climate realities. My chief source today
isThe
Madhouse Effect by Michael Mann and Tom Toles.

Florida has maybe the worst situation. With 1,200 miles of coastline and more than 5
million residents who would be displaced by just 10 feet of sea-level rise,
Florida has more to lose by unmitigated climate change than any other
state. So what was Republican Governor
Rick Scott’s plan to protect his state? He proposed banning the use of the
terms climate change and global warming in all official state
communications and publications. And
Florida’s US senator and former presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio? He
attacked the scientists, denied any human role in warming, and oppose all
viable policy solutions.

Climate denialism is not only
coastal. Senator James Inhofe (R. Okla.)
is one of the worst. He declared that
climate change is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” And Republican Representative Joe Barton of
Texas, said: “the science is not settled, and…is actually going the other way,”
“we may in fact be going into a cooling period,” “C02 is rising, but it is not
necessarily…causing temperature to
rise.” He was chair of the House
committee on Energy and Commerce. Both
Inhofe and Barton received considerable money from the fossil fuel industry
during their congressional fossil fuel industry service.

Global Warming and Wars

Global warming will increase
conflict. The population is increasing.
Warming will increase competition among a growing global population over
less food, less water, and less land—a prescription for a storm of wars small
and large. That storm has long been
brewing. The ongoing drought in Syria
was made worse by the aggravating effects of climate change, increasing
population, and increasing scarcity of water, all of which played a role in the
civil unrest and social instability that led to the civil war there, in which
the US has intervened.

Let’s never forget the foreign wars we
are fighting in dangerous regions of the world, like the Middle East to keep
oil flowing to the US and its allies.
The US had as of October 2015,
approximately 35,000 U.S. military personnel in the Middle East. In Iraq in 2016, 5000 and in
the other ME countries. And that’s not
counting the contractors keeping them
combat operating. Think of these wars as
a $100 billion subsidy to the fossil fuels industry, courtesy of the US
taxpayer.

Conclusion

Lying deniers of warming delayed
government action to mitigate and adapt to the effects of warming—needed on the
massive scale of the Marshall Plan perhaps plus the Apollo Moon space
flight. The warriors diverted the money
we needed and need for coastal cities, for all the sea walls, the removal of
towns and cities to inland locations, for forest fire-fighting, for recovering
from hurricanes and tornadoes, and the list continues into the trillions of
dollars.

Our executive and congressional leaders
were first warned by James Hansen in the 1980s.
We are not much better prepared today for the advancing warming
catastrophe as then.666 words add no more.

Dr. Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, UNPRECEDENTED
CRIME: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for
Survival. 2018.
The first half ratchets up the Hoggan/Littlemore exposes to urge prosecution
of truth-deniers.

What are your favorite ironies today?
Let me suggest two more.
One: The fortress at the center
of Baghdad is called the “Green Zone.” Two:
In 2008, while the Burj Dubai tower was being built (twice the height of the
Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society
of London was saying Farewell to the Holocene, Hello Anthropocene!

The Holocene epoch of stable climate that
allowed our civilization has ended. Because of the extraordinary human buildup of population,
consumption in affluent countries, capitalism, economic growth, CO2/greenhouse
gases, warming, weather instability, deforestation, acidification of the
oceans, and mass destruction of animals and plants, the Anthropocene epoch has
begun. Humans have forced evolution
itself into a new, rapidly developing trajectory.

Perhaps the single greatest institutional contributor to warming, the
largest single source of pollution in the world, is US militarism; in
particular, the military in its most ferocious mode, the US military at war,
now ceaseless. The military produces
enough greenhouse gases to place the entire globe in danger of extinction.

The scale of
environmental damage over the last half century is unprecedented. Falling water
tables, shrinking forest cover, declining species diversity all presage
ecosystems in distress. These trends are now widely acknowledged as emanating
from forces of humanity's own making; ironically however, war, that most
destructive of human behaviors, is commonly bypassed.

The disregard that all wars engender for
all living things, especially for ostensible enemies, is so common as to be
unremarked, and the Pentagon keeps no record of numbers of enemy combatants or
civilians killed. The private Information Clearing House, as of
January 2009, counted Iraq War civilian deaths at 1,297,997 since the invasion
in 2003. I have found no record of the
cows and chicken, dogs and cats, birds and snakes, crickets or butterflies
killed during those or any other years or wars.

If
humans who were seeking to avoid death were so slaughtered, how enormous must
have been the decimation of other species from the shooting, firing, dropping,
exploding, and incinerating. The “Shock
and Awe” invasion of Iraq began at 10:15 the evening of March 19, 2003, when
some 1,700 bombers and fighter planes flew some 1,400 sorties and fired 504
cruise missiles directly into Baghdad. In the first two days 800 cruise missiles were
fired, one every four minutes, day and night.
Each missile weighed about 3,000 pounds, adding up to a total of 1,200
tons, or 2,400,000 pounds of explosives.

When
the US goes to war against a foreign nation it is a war not only against
people, but against the Earth, the soil and animals and plants, in the most
far-reaching, annihilating ways. The
earth can no longer absorb the punishment of war of the ferocity that the
greatest superpower in history is capable of inflicting.

Yet the US will not only not let go its will to dominate the world; rather it is tightening
its grip. In its latest National Defense
Strategy, the Pentagon declared a new Cold War with both China and Russia and promised
to wage the war around the globe. That
is, it is not a defense strategy, but an aggressive attempt to justify a massively
expensive military buildup for global control, the effects of which on the environment
and climate are beyond imagination.

What
we need is an International Rescue Strategy against the consequences of the
onrushing climate catastrophe that includes not only coastal city adaptations
to rising seas but relief for global economic inequality within and among
nations, and millions of displaced refugees.
Instead, the Pentagon offers us the old, ruinous, ostensible threat of
Cold War adversaries. As Pentagon Secretary
Jim Mattis expressed it, “Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the
primary focus of U.S. national security.” To the Pentagon, China and Russia
threaten the world, not warming, hurricanes, drought, extinctions, or rising
oceans.

Resistance

You
and I can make two effective responses right now. We can stop saying Department of
Defense. It’s the War Department, just as it was before
President Truman and the Pentagon cunningly changed its name. And we can support anti-war, anti-imperial
organizations; such as Veterans for Peace, Peace Action, AFSC/FCNL, ICAN, NAPF,
OMNI.

And then we can urge the United Nations to
estimate the environmental and climatic destruction of US wars before and
afterward, toward pushing Congress to force the Pentagon to declare the true
costs of its wars. This is a feasible
and even familiar practice. For
example, a 2010 study found that 3,000 companies
were responsible for $ 2.15 trillion worth of environmental damage in
2008.

And then we can laugh out
loud at all the green washing distracting us from these war and warming connections
and costs, many as absurd as Baghdad’s “green zone.” (800 words, I cut this
for the radio editorial to around 650 to be under 7 minutes)

Alice
and Lincoln Day,Producers. Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives: The
Environmental Footprint of War. The
effects of war and war preparations on the environment, while profound, have
been largely overlooked.

TheUS is a nation of war. It began by war; it conquered
continental USA--some 500 Indian nations--by war; it grabbed a third of Mexico
by war; it subdued the Philippines by war; in WWI it joined one side in a
colonial war of massive slaughter; since WWII its wars—some 40 interventions
and invasions-- have been virtually ceaseless.
As one historian wrote, the US has killed thousands of “enemy” soldiers
and millions of civilians by war.

How was that possible? When a warrior hawk president and his
advisors, whether liberal or conservative, want war, the president begins by
besieging the public. From the outset,
warrior leaders, all of whom represent themselves as the commander in chief, seek the impression of consensus behind the
president.

His main weapon is media spin. A media campaign for hearts and minds at
home, means going all out to
persuade us that the next war is as good as a war can be—necessary, justified,
righteous, and worth any number killed.

US leaders follow 2 steps to war: The
first is this battle over public opinion, and support for
war is the
first victory. Conquest is the second—since WWII, to name a
few of the invaded countries: Haiti,
Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan,
Iraq, War on Terror! The people of the
US have been sold a succession of wars, in their names and with their tax
dollars, time after time.

Among all the methods of propaganda, one of
the most obvious is fear-mongering. The president’s interventionists, his congressional supporters, and mainstream media enablers insist that military action is necessary to
prevent a whirlwind of calamities.

Less obvious is the deployment of
unexamined myths repeated so often for so many years, for so many
generations, most citizens take them for
granted. The march to war has been a
24-7 advertising campaign inseparable from the constant US self-aggrandizement
and cultural reinforcement for war. Here are a dozen of the many MYTHS that keep
us ready for war:

The US
is a Fair and Noble Superpower

Our
Leaders Will Do Everything they Can to Avoid War

Our
Leaders Would Never Lie to Us

The
Enemy Is a Modern-Day Hitler

The US
Stands for Human Rights

The
War Is Not about Oil or Corporate Profits

We Had
to Invade to Protect US Citizens

The
Enemy Is the Aggressor, Not Us

Opposing
the War Means Siding with the Enemy

Even
if the War is Wrong We Must Support Our Troops

The
Pentagon Fights Its Wars as Humanely as Possible

Our
Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman

Withdrawal
Would Cripple US Credibility

These have been features of US self-branding as a good nation and
people, and therefore as good war-makers.
But they have not always been successful, especially if the war is
lengthy. The US was defeated in Vietnam
after over fifty thousand US troops and some 3 million Vietnamese were
killed. The US invasion of Cuba was
stopped at its shores, which intensified the US economic invasion.

Hermann Goering offers a partial
explanation of public war acquiescence:
“…of course, the people don’t
want war. . . .But it is a simple matter to drag the people along. . . .the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders [for war]. That is easy.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce
[opponents] for lack of patriotism.”

But Goering was generalizing from a nation
lacking robust democratic institutions.
The US has had those institutions, and Goering unintentionally suggested
how we might strengthen them to prevent or stop wars, at least to make it less easy for our leaders to be sheepherders.

Challenging fear-mongering wherever and
whenever by vigorous application of knowledge through the First Amendment can
be a safeguard against falsehoods and manipulations by war demagogues. Sturdy critical thinking in the public
schools, questioning all the leaders and myths that grease the wheels of war,
can be another bulwark against the Democratic/Republican War Party. 674 the
editorial we recorded today is 7 minutes
14 seconds long.

References #17:

Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005).

War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death. Written and directed by Loretta
Alper and Jeremy Earp. Produced by Loretta Alper. Based on the book by Norman
Solomon. Narrated by Sean Penn.

But on the
large TV networks, such voices were so dominant that they amounted to a virtual
monopoly in the “marketplace of ideas.” This article is excerpted from Norman
Solomon's book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death (John
Wiley & Sons, 2005). The first chapter of the book
can ...

William
Blum. Killing Hope and Rogue State. Gives a chronology of US interventions
and invasions. Source of my statement
regarding millions killed by US aggressions.

Editorial #16, War, Saturday, February 10, 2018
(broadcast date).

Rachel MADDOW, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.

Title: How
US Leaders Led Us Into Endless Wars.

My broad subject is US culpability or complicity in
most of its warsand for warming since WWII. Today I’ll ask again (see #10) how the US
became a nation of wars, how we became so quick to war. My
main source is Rachel Maddow, her book Drift:
The Unmooring of American Military Power (2012).

In foreign affairs George Washington sought primarily to keep the United States neutral. He was not only successful, but set a
precedent for U.S. foreign policy for many years to come. How the US rejected that policy is a long history.
In late 19th century, the US brutally invaded and occupied the
Philippines. But the US was reluctant to
enter WWI, a war already three years in duration before the US joined the
allies in combat.

So
how did the US in recent years become a nation of frequent wars? Why has it become so easy for our leaders to
choose war rather than diplomacy? What
happened to the constraints keeping us from going to war first established by
George Washington?

Let’s start with August 2, 1990. The Soviet Godzilla was dead. There was talk of a peace dividend. We could now convert the trillions of dollars
for war preparation to human needs at home and abroad. Dick Cheney, Secretary of the Pentagon, and
Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been working feverishly to head
off a congressional effort to reduce the military budget.

And
then Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait replaced the Soviet Union as the enemy,
while Cheney and his deputies, like Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, refitted
the US military for this New World Peril, as they claimed: without increasing
expenses.

What
magic was this? Cheney expanded the old
pillars or criteria of military capability from 4 to 6 to make it appear to do
more with less, by increasing employment of contractors under the new pillar of infrastructure
and overhead.

In the 1990s, with many wars behind us,
the double expense of a standing army and R&D led the Pentagon to consider private contractors, who, it was argued,
would be less expensive and more efficient in ensuring US military
preeminence in the coming century.
The first private contractor under this program was signed in 1992. It was a company called Brown &
Root. And then Cheney became CEO of
B&R’s parent corporation, Halliburton. By the time of the Bosnian war of the
Clinton administration in 1995, the private military industry had come of age,
and an equal number of private company employees went with the troops.

The
1996 Defense Science Board Task Force on Outsourcing and Privatization declared
that private contractors should be expanded throughout the military. In Clinton’s 8 years in office military
privatization exploded with massive cost overruns—from a few hundred million
dollars to $300 billion when he left office, but not labeled military
spending. The militarization by
corporations happened so fast and so enormously that the Pentagon could not say
whether 125,000 or 600,000 employees were on the payroll.

But what the profit-seeking privateers had not warned the government
about was the criminal behavior of the contractors. As one investigator wrote about DynCorp in Bosnia: they were a
secretive, unregulated, well-paid, lawless, band of mercenaries guilty of malfeasance, fraud, bilking, and purchasing
live-in sex slaves.

DynCorp illustrates the creep
to full, unaccountable privatization. By
the time Clinton left office, the Pentagon was also outsourcing information
technology, payroll, mapping, aerial surveillance—even intelligence gathering.

What had happened, with acute and lasting
harm, was the unmooring of our wars from
politics, from the decision to go to war to public debate about that
decision. Thomas Jefferson’s citizen
soldiers made it harder to go to
war. Privatization made it easier. The move from a somewhat restricted
military to unrestricted private contractors occurred without the public much
noticing, which helps explain public acquiescence and silence.

James Madison understood well the
consequences of war: “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is the
most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” 685 (8
minutes?? Shorten next to 7 or 600 words)

References to #16

Rachel
Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American
Military Power (2012).

A sample of
books cited by Maddow: P. W. Singer, The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry; Robert Griffith,
Jr., The U.S. Army’s Transition to the
All-Volunteer Force, 1968-1974; Steven
Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The
Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989; David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now; Tom
Gervasi, Soviet Military Power: The
Pentagon’s Propaganda Document ; Lawrence Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up; Charlie Savage,
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial
Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy; Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.

Editorial
#10 is also partly about why the US chooses war so quickly.

Forthcoming
editorial: Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death .

The
preceding three editorials described aspects of the warming planet with
connections to continuing war. The last
editorial summarized the catastrophic twins of warring and warming
and, as in other editorials, suggested a resistance--the Magna Carta’s Charter
of the Forests in defense of the commons.

A recent special issue of The Nation magazine is devoted to, “The
Resistance,” the dissenters to the powers presently ruling the US. John Nichols praises Bill Moyers as the “Most
Valuable Modern Pamphleteer,” and compares him to Tom Paine in the 18th
century, both of whom advocated revolutionary ideas, radical proposals, and
transformational movements. Let’s keep
them in mind.

Now
we return to the subject of war.My main reference is The War and Environment Reader, edited
by Gar Smith (2017).

Permanent War

The history of the world has
never seen a Palace Guard even near this size and destructiveness. The Pentagon justifies such expenditure as
the protector of the largest empire in history, its population, its
freedom. So let’s ask first, What is the
cost of all this militarism? In later
editorials we’ll assess the military-industrial complex.

By the 1960s the industrial-military-congressional-White
House merger already seemed too large and too profitable to reverse. That complex of power controlled not only the
Army, the Navy, the Air Force, but the countless other secret or hidden
national security departments: NSA, CIA, Energy Dept. (nuclear weapons),
Veterans Affairs, State Dept., Treasury Dept.
By 2017 the budget was nearly $1 trillion: over half of all the military
expenditures of all countries in the world combined.

Today the US maintains tens of thousands
of troops at some 800 bases in more than 60 foreign countries, and has troops
in about 150 countries, total. It has
nineteen aircraft carriers, and ten carrier battle groups. And thousands of combat aircraft. In Arkansas, in Fort Smith, drones. In Little Rock, the C-130Js. In Camden, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman.

Five of the world’s largest war-profiteering
companies call the US home. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest
arms dealer, responsible for nuclear weapons, Trident submarines, Hellfire
missiles. The next four are Boeing,
that makes B-52 bombers and smart bombs.
Raytheon: Tomahawk long-range
missiles, munitions. Northrop Grumman:
Global Hawk drones, laser weapons. And
General Dynamics: jet fighters, tanks, missiles, guns.

In 2014 total sales for the top six US
arms makers topped $241 billion.
Two-thirds of the world’s arms makers are based in the US or Western
Europe, and they control more than 84 percent of the global arms trade.

In
addition to its combat bombs, tanks, and fuel consumption, according to the
Pentagon’s FY 2010 Base Structure Report,
its global empire included more than 539,000 facilities at nearly 5,000 sites
covering more than 28 million acres.
The Pentagon burns 320,000 barrels of oil a day, and that estimate ignores fuel consumed by its
contractors and weapons producers. And
the Pentagon is exempt from reporting its actual total pollution, that might
arouse the public.

Even when not engaged in outright war (but
when was that?), the Pentagon’s far-flung operations damage the environment at
home and around the world. Inside the US
exist more than 11,000 military dumps containing explosives, chemical warfare
agents, toxic solvents, and heavy metals.
The military is responsible for at least 900 of the country’s 1,300
super-toxic “Superfund” sites.

Abroad,
the scale of environmental destruction wrought by the US military tops all the
other military powers.

Think of the Pentagon as the greatest
institution for export for profit. At
home: a few people, especially investors
and CEOs, making a mountain of money. Abroad:
all of these weapons to ensure global control of investments, natural
resources, and transportation-- exporting war and threatening war to ensure
perpetual profit. The motto of the
military-industrial complex is: War is good for business. War profiteering is the USA.

Let’s pause a moment for two of the ironical
features of this egregious weaponizing.
First, the greatest linguistic coup in all history occurred in 1947 when
President Truman and Congress changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department, and used that misnaming to manipulate the US
taxpayers to pay for unceasing intervention, invasion, and occupation. Second, now the Pentagon and its contractors
realize that winning wars is not their goal, but much more profitable is
fighting unending wars. Hence the some
40 wars since the end of WWII and the unwinnable, undefinable, infinitely
expandable “war on terror.”

It should not surprise then that the Pentagon Secretary in 2001, Donald
Rumsfeld, confessed: “We cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” (The Pentagon is the only federal agency
exempt from annual audits.) What should surprise is the silence
of the public in every town in
the nation that cannot find enough money for good health, water, roads, and
education.

War on Planet/Terracide

If one takes time to reflect about this
gargantuan military encroachment throughout the world, one can begin to imagine
how much of nature it destroys

Thus, with its thousands of facilities
and dumps, its intervening, invading, and occupying countries around the world,
and possessing the world’s largest air force and navy, the Pentagon is the world’s greatest institutional consumer of oil and
a leading producer of climate-changing CO2.
That is, the US military does unparalleled
environmental harm to the planet.

In 2016, National Geographic warned that new perils were likely to arise
from the collision of war and nature.
Wars, and other acts of violence will likely become more commonplace in
coming decades as the effects of global warming cause temperatures to flare
worldwide. A
team of researchers predicted personal violence, civil unrest, and war could
increase 56 percent by 2050 as the planet warms--accelerating droughts, floods,
disease, crop failures, and mass migrations—and violence and wars.

And President Trump endorsed President
Obama’s plan to spend $1 trillion improving the US nuclear arsenal.

Equilibrium/Ecolibrium

In contrast, the peace movement hopes, by
exposing the incentives, structures, and facts of war and warming, to explain
the cascading dangers of terracide, to resist directly the war and warming profiteers,
and to convert war profits to ecolibrium—to life for all species in harmony
with nature. To this end the movement is
pushing for Green Constitutions, a Green Geneva Convention, a U.S. Department
of Peace, End of Invasions and Occupations, Green Marshall Plan, Earth
Federation, Cultures of Peace, Peace Journalism, Planetary Citizenship, a
Nonviolent Peaceforce, Military Accountability and Restoration, Peacebuilding
Programs in the State Department, National Budgets for People, Abolition of
Nuclear Weapons, Abolition of Arms Trade, Common Security System, Institutions
of Nonviolence, Demilitarized National Security.

Numerous books reinforce Smith’s picture
of US aggression. Two books by William
Blum: Killing Hope and Rogue State. Derber & Magrass, Bully Nation. See any of the many books on US conquest
of continental N. America and near-extermination of the indigenous people. Additional books catalog the decimation of
nature by these aggressions; e.g., Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. I will discuss these and more books in
later editorials.

My
overall topic is War and Warming, the emphasis alternating back and forth. The
last three editorials were about warming. Today we transition to wars, or I say, war, singular because for several
decades the US has invaded and bombed, or threatened to invade and bomb, many other
countries. My title is: Nuclear War and Climate Change. My
main reference today is Nuclear War and
Environmental Catastrophe byNoam
Chomsky and Laray Polk.

Humanity
and all species face the twin catastrophes of nuclear war and climate
change. I say twin, because they are inseparable. There will be no limited hydrogen nuclear war,
which will immediately kill millions and destroy numerous whole cities, which
will significantly increase more warming and more war. And very soon, unless extraordinary
alterations are made in our economic and energy system, climate change will
become rampant. Already occurring
extraordinary weather extremes, will worsen, lead to more hunger, more
refugees, and more wars, more hunger, more wars. Even a nuclear war between the nuclear powers
Pakistan and India, for example, threatened almost daily by their military
clashes in and on the borders of Kashmir, would significantly disrupt the
Middle East and Asia and the climate by spreading millions of tons of smoke and
debris into the atmosphere, disrupting agriculture worldwide.

The world knows we would do it, based on
US history and the double-standard that rules our foreign policy. We are the only nation to use nuclear
weapons, and we have threatened their use a dozen times, because of that double
standard that we apply to other countries but not to ourselves. For example, President Kennedy was willing
to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union based on the principle that the US
had the right to ring the USSR with military bases, missiles, and nuclear
bombs, but they do not have the
right to place their missiles in
Cuba, even to defend Cuba from US terrorist attacks then occurring and invasion
being planned by the US.

A decade later, Henry Kissinger called for
a nuclear alert to warn the Soviets not
to interfere when he was informing Israeli leaders they could violate a
cease-fire established under US/Soviet auspices. President Reagan risked nuclear war when he
sent air and naval probes near Soviet borders and military bases, causing
Russia to fear a nuclear attack was imminent.
And many more examples.

To these macho risks, US political and
business leaders added the denial or downplay of global warming while
increasing consumption of fossil fuels, and consumption of the dirtiest tar
sands oil and offshore drilling. It was
profit first, short-term profit. The war/warming twins are still racing toward
environmental catastrophe, deliberate nuclear war or by accident, the seas
engulfing the coastal cities, hurricanes ravaging entire countries, fires
sweeping millions of acres.

We need to ask ourselves: what aspects of
our society caused this madness. Why
have our leaders not engaged in an Apollo moon-shot size, or Manhattan Project
crash program, or another Marshall Plan, to build a sustainable energy future,
for their and our grandchildren, with good jobs for sustainable energy? Why do
we not move to save ourselves, our children and children’s children? Why are we so blind, so paralyzed? The answer must be: our ruling economic system of capitalism more
than in any other country in the world not only permits but encourages
all-out extraction and development and growth until all the fossil fuel is
exhausted and heat has desertified our land and acidified our oceans.

The principal architects of this system—from
Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce to Congress and the White House-- the
business/political elite make sure their
interests, their ideology of short-term
gains, succeed, including permanent war,
whatever the consequences, no matter how grievous the effects on the entire
world and future generations.

These principal architects include media
allies who have successfully immunized the population against their common interests, against international
amity, mutuality, cooperation, sharing, the values of the United Nations.

To conclude, let’s look to the past to
see an avenue to the future. Remember
the Magna Carta? It’s really two Charters. This great British statement of rights in the year 1215 inspired
protections for civil and human rights in Britain, then the US Bill of Rights, and
eventually the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR). But it also stressed saving the commons from autocratic destruction and
privatization, by its Charter of the Forests.The Charter of
the Forest was the first environmental charter incorporated
in a government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of
the commoners, and of the commons.

Stephen Rabe. The
Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist
Revolution in Latin America. 1969.

(Allison, Krauss, and Rabe were cited by Chomsky

EDITORIAL #13, WARMING (#6 ), JANUARY 17,
2018, 697 words

Title: Resistance to US Capitalism: Giant Engine of
Warming

My preceding two editorials discussed the
successful two crucial decades of denial of warming by the fossil fuels
companies and made a case for replacing profit-first US capitalism with an
economic system for all the people. My
present editorial gives more specific substance to the resistance to the system.
My chief reference is NAOMI KLEIN’s book, NO IS NOT ENOUGH.

Corporations and their government
supporters sought to lay a pipeline for the dirtiest oil from Alberta, Canada, across
North Dakota to Houston refineries, its destination China. They met BDS resistance all the way--boycott,
divestment, sanctions-- by people who knew that more fossil fuels ensured that global
temperatures would rise beyond safe levels.
The people created blockades to stop the despoilers. The
resisters needed help.

President Obama finally denied the
pipeline permit. Resisters had been
successful: saying no to an imminent
threat while working tirelessly to build the yes for the world we want and need.
But then Donald Trump became
president and began dismantling and reversing against the planet more
ferociously than had President Bush.

One achievement of the struggle to stop
the oil pipeline was its clarification of the system behind the outrage. The
struggle had inspired awareness among the people. Ecocidal capitalism laid the pipeline over
the Oglalla Aquifer, under the Native reservation, and through the Missouri
River. Racism/white supremacy made it
possible to treat indigenous water and climate protectors with water cannons in
freezing weather. People were seeing
and speaking out about the connections: “that the economic interests pushing
hardest for war, at home and abroad, are the very same forces most responsible
for warming the planet” and “that the economic precariousness” that most people
were feeling flowed “from the same place: a corrosive values system that places
profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of
money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of
scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House.” (NO 232).

The limitless taking and extracting, the maximum grabbing
from workers, the less job security, and lower wages, community resources taken
away, and workers laid off. Did you see
the headline January 9? “UAMS Slashing
600 Jobs to Curb Deficit.” This is what
a system addicted to short-term profits and wealth does: it treats people, the
earth, and the atmosphere like resources to be mined to their limits

In contrast, when people speak about the world they want, the words are care and caretaking—care
for the land, care for the planet’s living systems, care for one another. A system in which everyone is valued, and we
don’t treat people or the natural world as if they were disposable.

Out of these experienced connections
arose a vision of cooperation for the
well-being of all--in Canada called “The Leap.” The world people want and need would create
unionized jobs and deliver justice. Green jobs would become anything useful and
enriching, without fossil fuels.
Nursing, teaching were renewable energy.
The goal was to transform an economy of destruction into an economy of
love for the rebirth of humanity.

The result is The Leap Manifesto—A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth
and One Another. Even more urgently,
it is a call to the United States.

For decades, ruling elites around the
world have been using the power of shock to impose nightmares. Donald Trump thinks he’ll be able to do it
again and again—that we will have forgotten by tomorrow what he said yesterday
(which he will say he never said). But
we can build a movement of resistance and hope and justice and love.

The corporate coup described by Naomi
Klein in NO IS NOT ENOUGH and
hundreds of books and articles and films and speeches is a crisis with global
reverberations that could echo through geologic time. As Santee Dakota artist and poet John Trudell
said: “I’m not looking to overthrow the
American government, the corporate state already has.” How we respond to the crisis is up to
us. So let’s leap to the call for the
United States to care for the earth and one another. 697

References:

Naomi Klein.
No Is Not Enough: Resisting
Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. 2017. (Leap Manifesto at end).

______. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism.

Wolin. Democracy Inc.

EDITORIAL #12, WARMING (#8), JANUARY 10, 2018. (The date is that of the studio recording, not of the radio
broadcast.)

REPLACING THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM TO ONE
LESS DESTRUCTIVE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

My last editorial reported the massively
funded and well-organized campaign of warming denial that delayed mitigation
and adaptation for some two decades, continuing and hardening under President
Trump. This editorial offers a basic
response to those who agree with the President. My main reference is: What Everyone Should Know about Capitalism by Fred Magdoff and John
Bellamy Foster.

The US, mainly, has pursued an economic
system confusingly called “neo-liberal” capitalism of unlimited, minimally
regulated growth in a limited environment.
It’s a catastrophic equation for the planet. At present it is producing extreme economic
inequality among and within nations.
Here’s a sample headline:
“World’s Richest Add $1 Trillion in 2017.” “The
richest people on earth became $1 trillion richer this year, more than four
times last year’s gain.” Amazon.com
founder Jeff Bezos gained $34.2 billion.

But more important, the continuation of
this, grow-or-die capitalism based upon unlimited capital accumulation, is a
flat impossibility. For all those
concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not
simply the dire reality of climate change and nuclear weapons loaded and aimed
and leaders threatening to use them, but the pressing need to change the basic
relationships between humans and the earth.
Put simply, we must break with a system based on the motive of profit,
and ideology of individualism and competition for the accumulation of
capital. Instead we must create a new
world in harmony with the planet.

George Monbiot locates this new world in “community,” for the new politics, communities
“to own and manage local resources, ensuring that wealth is widely shared. . .
. common riches to fund universal benefits.“ But President Trump and his Party are
pushing the system farther and farther toward ferocious extremes of extraction
and consumption, for a few, regardless of consequences.

Can
we stop Trump, get rid of fossil fuels, and Save the Climate? To do so will take tremendous personal
restraint in consumption in the developed nations, unprecedented political
courage in planning and organizing government for the planet, and global
cooperation hardly yet even imagined.

Here’re
some ways we can change the present economic system of profit and accumulation,
to one that will protect the planet and meet the needs of all species.

1. Give equal weight to equality with freedom in
deciding social choices.

2. Infuse public education with understanding of
how the US economic system has promoted environmental destruction.

3. Massively cut military spending and thus the
military-industrial complex by converting that spending to needs caused by warming.

4. Pressure
the US to cooperate in a world
agreement for a drastic reduction in carbon emissions. This could follow the Peoples’ Agreement drafted in 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

5. Establish environmental justice for all
suffering from environmental inequality.

6. Rich countries provide a fund to help
developing countries pay for the costs of adapting to climate change.

8. Create jobs for workers displaced by wars and
warming, and by automation. Listen to
President Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address advocating an
Economic Bill of Rights: “the right to a useful and remunerative job…the right
to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation…the right
of every family to a decent home…adequate medical care…good education.”

Here
are several specific changes to advance these larger goals:

1. Institute a carbon tax in which dividends are
returned to the people.

My
editorials discuss warming and nuclear wars, the two greatest threats to our
planet. I alternate from one subject to
another. Today I return to warming,
specifically those who deny the evidence.
My main reference is Climate
Cover-up by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore.

This is a story of betrayal, a story of
selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of
deceit, of poisoning public judgement, of an attack on our political
structures, and undermining the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social
institutions honest. But it is also a
story of resistance, of great public service by investigative reporters, and of
finally successful revelation of corporate crime and public truth.

Over twenty
years ago the scientific consensus asserted the fact that human-caused, global
warming was increasing weather extremes.
All of the world’s scientific academies stated emphatically that the
world’s climate was changing dangerously and humans were to blame. But
that was not what was being reported.

Mainstream newspapers were reporting conflicting stories, because coal
and oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and fossil fuels companies like
Exxon Mobil had financed an organized campaign to cast doubt on the
science.

The corporate
deniers were twisting the data to mislead people, hiring the few denier
scientists to practice not science but public relations, and hiring the best
advertising companies to purvey their lies.
The media manipulation worked, exactly as it had years before in
delaying regulation of smoking tobacco. For
two decades the disinformation campaign was successful, and the government did
nothing to disrupt the profitable oil status quo.

Gradually
the people of the world learned they had been lied to. As
early as 1988 the director of NASA’s
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, told a Senate
committee: “the greenhouse effect is here.”
Another early truth-teller was Ross Gelbspan. Near the end of the 20th century,
he had discovered that the fossil fuelers had organized a huge, well-funded
campaign to make the public think that climate science was controversial, and
climate change unproven. He revealed the
truth in two books, The Heat Is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004).

But
the carbon corporate/congressional campaign to defeat climate science increased
its money and its lobbying. The year 2008 was particularly corrupt, we know thanks to reporting
by the DeSmogBlog, OpenSecrets.org, and the Center for Public Integrity. One headline declares: “Oil and gas lobbying
on Capitol Hill up a Whopping 57% in 2008.”
But get this: The industry lobbying budget in 2008 was already $82
million. So the total lobbying budget
for 2008 was $128.6 million. Some 770
companies hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence our congressional
representatives on climate change, as the issue headed toward a vote on Capitol
Hill. That’s more than four climate
lobbyists for every member of Congress.

The
public’s struggle for the truth has not gotten easier in another way. Whereas the money flow corruption was somewhat
restrained in 2008, in
its Citizens United v.
Federal Election Commission decision,
Jan 21, 2015, the
US Supreme Court opened the campaign spending floodgates. Thinking back to the 1970s, to President Nixon and the
Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, as I speak, much of
the regulation passed earlier is being systematically dismantled by President
Trump.

But
it’s a free country and oil companies have every right to protect their
profits?? Or it’s wrong, and we should
all stand up and demand our government work for us before the fossil fuelers
push us off the cliff onto the ever-more undeniable rocks waiting below. Next week I’ll discuss that question. 574

EDITORIAL #10 (Dec. 27, 2017) WARS (#6),
WHY THE US CHOOSES WAR SO EASILY, THE US OUTSIDE THE WORLD QUICK TO WAR (p. 22)

My broad
subject comes from the title of the book
America Outside the World
by Louis Beres. On the climate catastrophe rushing upon us,
President G. W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Climate
Treaty and President Donald Trump rejected the Paris Climate Agreement. On nuclear weapons, against 122 nations,
President Trump rejected the UN General Assembly’s treaty abolishing nuclear
weapons. And Trump formally recognized
Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in defiance of the world’s nations. Actually, “outside” the world is a
euphemism; rather let’s say outlaw
against the world.

The 9-11 murder of thousands of innocent men
and women in the NYC Trade Towers is an unforgiveable atrocity. But it does no good to call terrorist acts
senseless or cowardly, when we need to understand why the NYC buildings were attacked. Malice and fanaticism were in the terrorists’
heads, but so also was opposition to US policies in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden had made that emphatically
clear. If we think of the bin Ladens as devils, then consideration of options,
of complexity, of thought, are
impossible.

Hence
Bush and Cheney in furious thoughtlessness invaded all of Afghanistan, defeated
the Taliban and killed many civilians, then occupied the country while killing
many more civilians and our own troops, in a country where only a handful of
Afghans had participated in the bombings of the NYC Towers, while the actual
perpetrator, bin Laden, escaped. Two years
later George and Dick ordered shock and awe against Iraq based on a pack of
lies, and hundreds of more US troops
and thousands of Iraqis perished, and the occupation and killings continue in
both countries.

The
first two questions we might ask is, who are these despicable leaders, and how
did they get elected? But leaders are
not my purpose. They have received much, though hardly enough, study. Similarly, why would the people of the US
elect such leaders, so quick to attack and bomb and destroy? How could they have been so thoughtless? But again that question has been often
studied.Rather let us ask more specifically: Why
did so many of the public so quickly accept the Bush administration’s
assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (which he
did not)? Why was there no public
uprising when respected General Powell lied at the UN about Iraq’s wmd on the
flimsiest of evidence? Why did the
public so willingly believe that invading and occupying and destroying Iraq should
be the first instead of the last response?
The UN Security Council had refused to authorize the invasion. Why, before sending to war and possible death
our young men and women, did the people not insist upon the strongest of
evidence? Why, given such absence of
justification, did so many accept the most violent, cruelest action over peaceful
communication, diplomacy, and negotiation?

The full
reply is multiple, but it must include this truth: the majority fell for the oldest of war justifications:
the alleged enemy was a super-enemy, he was capital E EVIL who sought to harm
the US, that is us. Thus we had a sacred right to violate the
standards of clear thinking and of ethics, and to shred international laws,
including the UN Charter, by invading and occupying two sovereign nations that
had not threatened the US. Later our
leaders claimed our moral duty to liberate the people of Afghanistan and Iraq
and to create democratic republics.
How? By by invading, bombing,
destroying the countries and killing their people.

These
are familiar arguments by the leaders of the US: from the wars against Mexico, Spain, two
World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf War to Libya and Syria. Their purpose? To create fear. By causing the people to abandon critical
thinking and ethics and instead to embrace authority for truth and protection. To create fear by stressing defense against
Evil Enemies. Bush’s Security Adviser
Condoleeza Rice tried to scare everyone into invading Iraq by saying “we don't
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud." She put the final nail in the war hysteria
begun in 1947 when the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. And our troops have been fighting abroad
for the longest continuous stretch in their history: over two decades if one
starts with the first Persian Gulf War in early 1990s and the sanctions that
killed a half-million Iraqi children.

Many cried out for peaceful and
honorable alternatives to war, but the invasions moved forward. A minority of voices declared that war would
destabilize the Middle East and even the world, and harm the US, and that
proved true. Conflict resolution reason was drowned out by
the ruses of war deployed by the highest officials to secure mass approval of
yet another war, most of the population acquiesced, and the slaughter in Yemen and the threats of
slaughter against North Korea continue the derangements of violent force.

But the human search for a just and therefore
peaceful society has not been defeated. We have yet to get at the root of such violent
history. Let’s grasp this deplorable
shift to ceaseless mass bloodshed as the opportunity to reconceive our public
education K-12, above all as the time to learn critical thinking, ethical
reflection, healthy skepticism, questioning authority, and demanding evidence
before we give our assent to mass killing.

Our
leaders tell us we must choose war for freedom, national security, the
flag. Instead, let us urge our school
superintendent, our principals, teachers, librarians, and ourselves at home, to
teach clear thinking, ethics, and alternatives to war. And we must act now, because our country is
outside the world, and the next shock and awe is being planned.

(MILITARIZATION OF US) CREATION OF THE US
WARFARE STATE: WWII TO PRESENT

My last
editorial sought communion and cooperation with all other nations, if we are to
avoid climate or nuclear destruction.
Today let’s consider why control by armed force is the goal of the
United States instead of international amity.
Andrew Feinstein’s book, The
Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, is our guide.

US
victory in WWII ironically eventuated in long-term defeat--the decline from a
civilian to a militarized government.MilitarizedIndustrial
output doubled between 1940 and 1943 to a level nearly that of Britain, the
Soviet Union, and Germany combined. The atomic bombs dramatically increased the
power of the presidency and transformed the affirmative New Deal of, by, and
for the people, into a National Security State. The US populace learned to accept militarization
as its way of life: an increasing proportion
of US national resources was directed into the military; a closeness grew of US
military, government, the presidency, and corporations. While it won the war, victory by war lost the
peaceful future.

Particularly unprecedented was the increase of presidential power.

Under Franklin Roosevelt power of command and
secrecy increased while under demands of war accountability decreased. By exterminating two civilian city
populations, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ordered by President
Harry Truman exceeded anything ever imagined for the executive branch, and that
bomb power influences our foreign policy to this day. The secrecy and military discipline of the
Manhattan Project that created the atomic bombs became a model for the covert
operations and overt authority that have defined US government in the nuclear
era. The wartime emergency put in place
during WWII extended into the Cold War and the war on terror, the Middle East
war, and the pivot to encircle China. For over 70 years a state of continuous war has
dominated the US and therefore the world.

After
WWII when the “Cold War” as it was called with the Soviet Union heated up, the
Truman Doctrine created the most significant expansion of US foreign intervention
since the Monroe Doctrine. Truman set in
motion the militarized response to Soviet communism as a threat to free people
everywhere requiring US protection everywhere, and permanent military
preparedness. The National Security Act
of 1947 increased the war-making power of the president in specific ways;
including the unification of the armed forces, changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense (a title
that has bumfuzzled the public ever since), the creation of the CIA and the
NSA/National Security Agency, and diminishing the foreign policy power of the
State Department. The CIA created an
invisible, new layer of secrecy and reduction of accountability. The US national security state had been
formally launched.

The
main beneficiaries were the arms
industry. Since 1947, the Pentagon has
become the center of a vast system of recruitment centers, propaganda centers, military
bases, laboratories, testing grounds, command centers, intelligence centers,
corporations, and academic institutions, for which one thing is certain: it
spends more on war than on human needs. Now
the military and industry share an unprecedented level of cooperation,
compounding their cumulative level of influence over policy--the MIC OR military-industrial
complex as described by President Eisenhower—or as he might say today: the
corporate, military, intelligence, presidency, Congress, mainstream media,
national security state.

In 1953
President Eisenhower delivered his “Chance for Peace” speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Alas, despite these truths, Eisenhower’s
administration conducted its foreign policy as did Truman before him and as did
all subsequent US presidents—through covert operations in foreign countries,
most notoriously Guatemala and Iran.

All
under the guise of saving the world from communism, that gigantic octopus
reaching around the world and knocking over national dominoes, mixed metaphor
disregarded, while never mentioned by the ruling elites, Increasingly,
corporate stockholders’ profits soared.
Another general told the truth about corporate profit and US
empire. Major General Smedley Butler,
two-time Medal of Honor recipient and the most decorated marine in US history,
said of his own participation in profit-driven US military actions around the
world: “I spent 33 years and four months
in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a
high class muscle man for Big Business.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And that was long before General Eisenhower made
his “Chance for Speech” speech. As I
said at the beginning, Big Business has always been in the war racket, and all
the time Big Business has grown Bigger and Bigger. 774 words

References

Feinstein, Andrew.
The Shadow World: Inside the
Global Arms Trade. 2017.
(Feinstein drew from Eugene
Jarecki, The American Way of War (2010),
for the section I used.)

Wills, Gary.Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency
and the National Security State. 2010.

Editorial #8 (12-13-17): Wars (#4), the US Outside the World

These
commentaries explore the US role in the wars and warming engulfing the
planet. Today my very broad theme is
“The US Outside the World.” That is,
despite the many good things our country has accomplished for humankind, they
are undermined by our having become the leading warfare and warming nation.

My last editorial reported on the power
over the US and the world of what is called “neo-liberal” capitalism as the
primary engine of the climate catastrophe.Today I will report on US imperial, military power, from America Outside the World by Louis Beres. President Eisenhower called the two powers
the military-industrial complex. The two
main manifestations—warming and wars—are inseparable, and are the subject of
these editorials.

During
the Cold War from the 1940s to 1980s, US warfare foreign policy—chiefly arising
from the presumed need to maintain military superiority over the Soviet
Union—exacerbated the economic system:
deficits in budget and trade, inflation and waste, commodity obsolescence,
frequent product change, unstable markets, cost-plus pricing, and large corporations and bureaucracies beyond
public control. The massive transfer of
capital away from civilian industry to the military sector neglected the
industries the people need. Instead of
stimulating productivity, competitiveness, and innovation, Washington’s
commitment to war as foreign policy dislocated the productivity of the past,
causing the lowest tiers of the middle class to fall into poverty, and many of
the poor to become destitute.

Military spending absorbs resources that might have been invested for
the people. While the budget goes to
weapons, our country ignores essential research that could develop alternate
sources of energy, increased food production, better housing, and improved
public health. These distorted
priorities limit innovation and investment, and lead to the trade deficit and
to the national debt, now $20 trillion .

Also,
military spending creates a debilitating shortage of professional talent in the
civilian sector. With the military
sector claiming 30 to 50 percent of the scientists and engineers, US industry
is unable to contend with foreign competition.
Pretending to solve the problem, our leaders exhort us to “buy American,”
but the remedy is to end the wars, and to return our skilled workers from their
Pentagon-directed laboratories and drawing-boards, and all else destructive of
climate and environment, like the Pentagon, to the capital-starved solar and
wind industries and all else beneficial to the people.

I
suspect all of this is obvious to most of our population, but now we are beaten
down into acquiescence and conformity by the incessant propaganda machine for
war, making it preeminent everywhere in
every nook and cranny of life. With the
support of the economic system, the military system crushes independent,
alternative thought and action.

We might
be rescued from this captivity of Sovietphobia, now Russophobia, of “war on
terror,” and the many enemies contrived by the military-industrial system. We might be liberated from the
economic-military-political system’s manufactured, subjugating movie of the
world. We might restore the USA to the
world by creating the conditions wherein citizens can become autonomous persons. We
might, each in our individuality, live in commonality and cooperation with
others worldwide.

But I do
not believe it will be achieved by some St. George defeating the Dragon. Liberation from wars and warming depends
upon self-liberation, people creating affirmative government of, by, and for
all the people of the planet. Only
then will the nation pursue foreign policies that point not to the perils of
nuclear war or climate catastrophe but toward planetization, seeking communion with all other nations. But that kind of education and culture is at
present only a dream of those who repudiate the economic and military system
ruling the country, those who refuse profit and conquest under the guise of
providing safety and freedom, those who reject patriotism and national unity by
means of endless slaughter.

My next
two commentaries will survey specific events in the recent history of US wars.651 words

References

Louis Beres.
America Outside the World: The
Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy.
1987.

My last editorial introduced Richard
Smith’s book, Green Capitalism: The God
That Failed. Smith exhorted us to
stop over-extracting and overconsuming natural resources, stop burning fossil
fuels, stop producing waste that can’t be recycled by nature. But under capitalism these goals are
virtually impossible. Here’s why: the eighteen features of an economic system
with too little government, that is public, oversight.

These
are the features of US capitalism today.
In Green Capitalism: The God That
Failed, Richard Smith indicts the economic regime for producing the planet-killing
surge of C02 from the 18th century to the present, spiking upward particularly
during the past seventy years since WWII.

He presents six theses regarding this system,
the US economic system.

1.
“Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological
collapse.” The key to this human-caused
rampage is corporations. Their purpose
is not the good of the people of the world, but they function for the benefit
of their shareholders. Shell Oilloots Nigeria and the Arctic of fossil fuels that cook the
climate. That’s its purpose; that’s what
shareholders demand—profit. For example, IKEA, the third largest consumer
of lumber in the world, can’t help but level the forests of the world to feed
furniture mills. That’s what the CEO is
hired by the shareholders to do.

And we’re all locked into the
economic system dependent upon fossil fuels in which companies have to grow to compete and
reward their shareholders and because we all need the jobs.

2.
“Solutions to the ecological
crisis are blindingly obvious, but we can’t take the necessary steps to prevent…collapse
because, so long as we live under capitalism, economic growth has to take
priority over ecological concerns, or the economy will collapse and mass
unemployment [and violence] will be the result.” Under capitalism, for example, the
incentive is to increase the
population consumption. How can one make
a profit if everything is static. Take
cars. In 1950 there were about 2.6
billion people. Today the planet has 7.5
billion. Now add advertising to increase
consumption. ln 1950 Americans had 1 car
for every 3 inhabitants. Today we have
1.2 cars for every person, and a world total of 1 billion cars, and the car
manufacturers are hoping for 2 to 2.5 billion by mid-century. That’s an exponential growth in cars, natural
resources use, energy production, and waste.

3. “If capitalism can’t help but destroy the
world, then what alternative is there but to nationalize and socialize most of
the economy and plan it directly, even plan most of the global industrial
economy?”

There is no alternative to
planning. We need planning on all levels
and coordination among them. We need
comprehensive global, regional, national, and local plans. When climate scientists call for cuts in CO2
emissions if we are to have a liveable planet, they are asking for forethought,
for planning.

4. “Rational planning requires democracy: voting
the big questions.”

Today huge decisions that affect all
species on the planet, even the fate of life, are private. Under capitalism the big issues are not put
up to a vote, but are decisions made by corporate boards on behalf of
self-interested investors, and by their well-lobbied political
representatives. But alternatives are available. The public utilities are run democratically
with public, that is, government oversight.
Greg Palast wrote a book about them, Democracy
and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services.

5. “Democracy can only work in context of rough
socio-economic equality and social guarantees.”

And
finally, 6. “This is [not] crazy,
utopian, impossible, will never happen.”

Smith’s Conclusion:

The climate problem threatening our
planet and all species is CO2 increasing, and atmosphere, ocean, and land
warming. These changes will destroy life
on Earth. The problem is rooted in the
ruling economic war for profit which compel corporations to pour on the gas
instead of slamming on the brakes. The
solution, impossible as it may seem, is to overthrow this system and all the governments
of the 1% that prop it up, and to replace
them with a global economic democracy,
a radical, bottom-up, democratic ecosocialist
civilization. This is no pipedream, no
delusion, but a necessity if we are to prevent the train wreck capitalism has
prepared for us. Globally people are
awakening to a democratic uprising for an alternative economic and social order
designed, not for the 1% stockholders and CEOs and their politicians, but for
the people.

These editorials explore US wars and
warming, past, present, future.Next
week we’ll return to the wars.But they
are never far from the warming; armaments and warming say to us:SLEEPERS AWAKE!

Editorial
#6 Global
Warming (#2),

FROM
GORE TO RICHARD SMITH’S GREEN CAPITALISM

So what must we do to slow down Arctic
ice melting and global oceans warming?
We must reduce C02 in the atmosphere.
That is, we must reduce fossil fuels emissions drastically. OMNI is hard at work at that, especially by
supporting Climate Change Lobby’s efforts since

2014 to tax fossil fuels at their
sources. Also, since 2006 OMNI’s Climate
Book Forum has discussed several dozen books covering the causes and
consequences of warming from many perspectives.

For example, scientists ask, what isthecause? Fossil-fuels emissions yes. But pushing deeper, what’s the cause of planet-killing
fossil-fuels? Scientists use the word
anthropogenic, or human-caused. But
which humans? A number of economist
scientists blame the ascendant human economic system, capitalism. But there are
degrees of capitalisms. US capitalism, or extreme capitalism,
sometimes confusingly called neo-liberalism, differs considerably from the
economies of Norway, Denmark, Iceland,
and Finland, for example, countries described as social democracies. These countries, by the way, enjoy the top
ranking in the 2017 World Happiness Report.
And third world countries produce comparatively low emissions.

Therefore some sociologists,
especially economist climatologists, argue we must move beyond reforms to revolutionary change. One such economist is Richard Smith, in his
book Green Capitalism: The God That
Failed.To Smith, US hyper-capitalism’s goal of unrestrained
development is driving us to ecological collapse. Overdevelopment began at the beginning of the
industrial revolution and accelerated extraordinarily during the last six decades,
from WWII to the present. Under the
pressures of profit, deregulated growth, competition resulting in monopoly, expanding
markets and resulting empire, and increasing population, we now live with an
atmosphere increasingly dense with C O2 and therefore warmer and more humid,
the oceans warmer and rising, and the weather more extreme. 307 words

When the industrial revolution began in the 18th century, when
population and production were comparatively small, capitalist freedom to make
and consume at will didn’t matter much.
But now when production is in billions of items and increasing, and the
population swells toward 9 billion, development and growth, competition and
waste, seem frantic and senseless. Between
1950 and 2000 the human population more than doubled from 2.5 to 6 billion, and in these same decades
consumption of major natural resources soared more than 6-fold.

Thus the world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary emergency. But no government opposes growth,
especially not our own. To the contrary,
in capitalist governments, which is most of the world, growth is God, and the
supreme goal is to accelerate growth for profit. 439words

We know what we to do: stop over-extracting and overconsuming natural
resources, stop greenhouse gas emissions, stop producing waste that can’t be
recycled by nature. We don’t need some
magical new technological breakthrough to solve these problems. We just need to stop what we are doing through
the capitalist system.

My next editorial will continue Richard Smith’s Green Capitalism: The God That Failed.

My slogan is: Think Global, Act Local
and Global. My editorials encompass wars and
warming. I have spoken about US wars and
empire, particularly about nuclear weapons, and their origins and
consequences. Now I’ll discuss global
warming similarly, today specifically the effects
of warming and begin to explore its deep cause and its solutions.

Here are a few consequences of warming from the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report,
leaked to the New York Times in
August 2017 because of fears the Trump administration might suppress it. Carbon dioxide has increased to dangerous
levels in the atmosphere. Global
temperatures are increasing. Arctic ice
is melting. The oceans are rising.

“Global mean atmospheric carbon dioxide
(C02) concentration has now passed 400 ppm parts per million, a level that last
occurred 3 million years ago when sea level was significantly higher than
today. There is no climate analog to
this century any time in at least the last 40 million years.”

“…average temperatures in recent decades
over much of the world have been much higher, and have risen faster during this
time period, than at any time in the past 1,700 years or more….”

“The Arctic is warming at a rate
approximately twice as fast as the global average,” and distant changes in the
climate system affect other parts of the world.

“The world’s oceans have absorbed about
93% of the excess heat….Global mean sea level has risen by about 7-9
inches…since 1900, with about 3 of those inches…occurring since 1993….the “rate
of rise…is greater than during any preceding century in at least 2,800 years.”

Al Gore’s new documentary, Inconvenient
Sequel: Truth to Power,

concentrates
on the effects of global warming
already happening around the world, and the politics, diplomacy, and moral
power of efforts to mitigate it. Al
Gore “was perhaps the most scientifically informed vice president in U.S.
history. His interest in and knowledge
of climate…goes back four decades. He
does his research. He respects science.”

An
Inconvenient Sequel offers “
powerful ways to illustrate both the latest scientific data and the effects” of
warming. Gore returns to the Greenland
ice cap to show us rushing rivers of meltwater plunging into huge holes in the
ice…Time-lapse photography shows vast realms of the ice crumbling before our
eyes….Where is that melt-water going?
Gorre segues to Miami Beach, its ocean-side streets flooding under high
tides.” Then he moves to India on a 120-plus-degree day where a woman’s sandals
stick to the melting asphalt.”

“As was long ago predicted scientifically,
a warming world leads to more frequent and much more intense heatwaves, storms,
and rainfall, and, in dry areas, more severe droughts.”

The film is also about Gore’s long experience
in climate diplomacy. Before the 2015 Paris
climate accords he worked successfully to get India not to build hundreds of
coal-fired power plants by arranging funds for India to go solar. His organized groups of hundreds of climate
science trainees around the world.

Although his work has been slowed in the
US, the rest of the world is going ahead without us, and Gore is exuberant in
the film showing how Chile is undergoing exponential growth in solar capacity. And even in Texas, a Republican mayor led his
town to supplant fossil fuels by wind and solar.

Gore is scientist and preacher. When our grandkids look back at us, he
warns, they will ask: What were we thinking by not leading the world to protect
the climate?

My
next commentary will be about Richard Smith’s book, Green Capitalism.

I have given 3 editorials on US wars and especially on US nuclear bombing
and threatening. My next main subject is
the approaching climate catastrophe. In
preparation, today I’ll speak about the connected global issues necessarily
conditioning local perspectives.

My chief assumption is that the US economic system, US empire, and US gender
and racial arrangements are by their nature and practice unjust, justice
defined as equity, a word meaning fairness.

Six years ago, supporters of Occupy Fayetteville/NWA, in association
with Occupy Arkansas and Occupy Wall Street, walked in the name of justice and peace,
and demonstrated on the Fayetteville Square to ban racism and nuclear bombs --
for justice, for fairness. Our leader
in perceiving the link was of course Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked about nuclear weapons Dr. King
said: “the development and use of nuclear weapons should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale
nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic.”
And he asked, “What will be the ultimate value of having established
social justice in a context where all people, Negro and White, are merely free
to face destruction by strontium 90 or atomic war?” Air war, indiscriminate decimation of cities,
destroys all achievements by their citizens of any color, and we ought to add:
of any gender.

“For King,” wrote Michael McPhearson, “Civil Rights was inextricably
linked to [world] peace.” King
repeatedly connected what he called the triple evils of war, poverty, and racism,
or war, the economic system of inequality, and racism.

The prominent writer, James Baldwin, made the same case. When he spoke at a rally on “Security Through
World Disarmament,” he was asked why he chose to speak at such an event, and he
replied: The fight for world peace and
the struggle for civil rights are the same.
“It is just as difficult,” he said, “for the white American to think of
peace as it is of no color.”

And again we should add gender. Another
important great source of injustice, perhaps even underlying war and racism, is
patriarchy. Domination is again the key. To some white men in power, the accumulation
of nuclear weapons to dominate and bully other nations is like the desire for
power over women.

And perhaps the present greatest, the most dangerous domination is that of
planetary warming, the result of human extraction of resources, particularly of
fossil fuels. From the beginning of the
industrial revolution, the mostly masculine economy has been devoted to exploiting
nature for human benefit but also producing too much overheating CO2.

All our main struggles are inextricably linked. Yours is mine, mine is yours. Global is local is global.

That is why we need a full-spectrum movement for peace, justice, and
ecology—to ban the bomb, to end color and gender inequality and discrimination,
and to defend the climate.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World
Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. 1986.

EDITORIAL
#3 (War #3) 494 words

“Facing Nuclear Madness
from Hiroshima 1945 to North Korea 2017” (for
KPSQ’s Weekly Program Fayetteville Folkus aired July 29 hosted by Jim Lukens. This recording was supervised by Mary
Gillcoat.)

My slogan for these
thumbnail commentaries is: “Think globally, act locally and globally.” We must
cultivate our local gardens, but national and international problems require us
to link local to national and international actions. My chief assumptions are that our main
dangers are the two catastrophes of nuclear war and climate warming, and our
response should be nonviolent.

The second largest
population of Marshall Islanders live in Washington County. Thus my first editorial told about the
Marshall Islands law suits versus the nuclear nations to make nuclear weapons
illegal.

My second editorial summarized
Fayetteville native and former Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright’s concept
of empathy in his book The Price of Empire. ThenI applied his ideas to the challenge
of ending United States/North Korean nuclear threatening today.

Now my subject is the
long remembrance in Fayetteville of the WWII nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The commemoration was begun by
the local Peace Organizing Committee during the 1960s, and held in the
University’s Greek Amphitheater. Each
year we learned more about the bombs and their consequences from books like
John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Robert J.
Lifton’s Survivors of Hiroshima, and
more about how to realize our slogan “Never Again” from speakers of campus and
towns, from songs, and music. The
1960s’s Peace Committee evolved into the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and
Ecology in 2001.

Our Remembrance has
been enhanced by the addition to the university campus of the Fulbright Statue
and Peace Fountain, and by the Peace Planet sculpture by Hank Kaminsky on the
Fayetteville Square. We have alternated
our ceremony between the two locations.
And our program has also enlarged as part of the growing international desire
to ban those bombs entirely. We
remember, and we join with others to abolish
nuclear weapons. It’s
happening: the United Nations General
Assembly voted to make the bombs illegal, along with chemical and other weapons
of mass destruction, and the Treaty is now being ratified, though not including
the United States.

On Sunday,
August 6, at 6 p.m., at our location for this year--the Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship, 901 W. Cleveland--the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology
invites you to attend our annual Remembrance of the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We remember the
deaths of 230,000 innocents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the victims of all
indiscriminate air war, we renounce war and threats of war, join Global Nuclear
Zero hopes of all humanity for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and celebrate
the United Nations Treaty Initiative to ban nuclear weapons. Music, poetry and speakers will reflect on
the meaning of the day. And a
live-stream video with Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui or his representative is anticipated.

This is always a deeply meaningful
occasion for people who long for peace.Please join us Sunday, August 6, 6:00 pm .

EDITORIAL
#2

TO KEEP THE TALK WITHIN 5 MINUTES I EXCISED THis
OPENING PAR on empathy/compassion

Fayetteville nourishes many compassion advocacy groups. Compassion is defined in one dictionary as “a
feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for someone struck by misfortune,
accompanied by a desire to alleviate the suffering.” No Empathy advocacy group exists here, by
name at least, but it is close to compassion. We might describe one mission of the UAF’s
Fulbright College to be the enlargement of empathy, defined as “the identification with or
vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, etc., of another.” Let’s for a moment consider the feelings of
empathy and compassion as two steps toward a moral life: empathic capacity to
imagine another’s state of mind and compassionate capacity to sympathize with
that other person.

TITLE of
#2: For World Peace, See the World as
Others See It (War #2) 432 words

Usually discussion of empathy is personal and local.
But it is also important for national and international affairs, and for
world peace. Fayetteville’s native son,
J. William Fulbright, exemplifies that belief.
Fulbright was briefly president of the Univ. of Arkansas and later a
U.S. senator and chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He is perhaps best known for his
international educational exchange program, partly based upon a philosophy of
empathy defined as “the identification with or vicarious
experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, etc., of another.” In his book The Price of Empire Fulbright explained his
commitment to empathy in the conduct of national relations. His final chapter is titled “Seeing the World
as Others See It,” and his “Afterword” describes “Changing Our Manner of
Thinking.” “Why is it,” he asks, “that
so much of the energy and intelligence of nations is used to make life painful
and difficult for other peoples and nations, rather than to make life better
for all?” His answer is: insufficient ability to perceive and feel the
experience, the outlook, the feelings of others, including official national
enemies. He notably opposed the Vietnam
War and other US invasions, such as the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, and
his opposition arose partly from his belief in the power for peace and justice
in empathy.

Thus it seems natural
to ask how Fulbright might respond
now to the confrontation between the United States and North Korea. An aspect of empathy is that knowledge of the other
is essential. We must know the history, the
feelings and thoughts of North Koreans. But our leaders make no effort
to see the world as Kim Jong Un sees it, or as his father and grandfather saw
it, despite the ample evidence of their worlds. Many books
and articles give us the history of the ancient culture of Korea, by which we
can know where the Kims are coming from, why for example they detest the
Japanese who brutally occupied their country, and with whom the U.S. has formed
a military alliance opposed to North Korea.
At least five books—by I. F. Stone, Bruce Cumings, Hugh Deane, Martin
Hart-Landsberg, and Charles Hanley--and many articles explain why the Korean
War and its horrendous decimation by the United States of N. Korea’s cities and
towns have such a powerful hold over Kim Jong Un’s mind.

Armed with knowledge and
understanding of the feelings and thoughts of the North Koreans, our leaders
could break the present dangerous pattern of threatened invasion and nuclear
devastation.

We must abolish
nuclear weapons. The nations possessing
nuclear weapons have increased from one to 9.
So long as the weapons are available, nations will seek them. Trimming the existing number will not stop
their proliferation and bring us safety.

Connect Local
and Global

I expect you
know that the US tested some 60 hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall
Islands during the 1950s. And you know
that the Marshall Islands community centered in Springdale is the largest
outside the Islands. Springdale is the
home of Marshall Islands’ US consulate.
Not so well known is that nation’s legal suit brought against all of the
nations possessing nuclear weapons. In
courts in the US and in the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is
challenging the nuclear nations for violating the Nonproliferation Treaty,
the NPT. Specifically,
the suit challenges their failure to initiate nuclear disarmament
negotiations in violation
of Article VI of
the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international
law. In fact to the contrary, the
Pentagon and Obama administration in 2015 initiated a 10-year trillion dollar
program to upgrade US nuclear weapons.

Think of that.
Already, each of the Ohio-class Trident submarines can carry up to 24
ballistic missiles(SLBMs)
with multiple, independently-targeted bombs.
One of those subs alone is called a doomsday machine, and the US has 14
of them. Add the bombs carried by our
intercontinental airplanes and in the missile sites around the country. And the bombs of the other 8 nuclear
nations. The danger is incalculably
immense—from accident, fear, or malice.

So
congratulations to the government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and
to former Foreign Minister Tony de Brum for being voted the 2016 Arms Control Person of the Year by the
Arms Control Association. The
award was given for taking the case to the International Court of Justice in
The Hague against the world's nuclear-armed states.

The OMNI Center for Peace,
Justice, and Ecology during its entire existence has warned against the
proliferation of nuclear weapons with our annual remembrance of the nuclear
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A
few years back we joined the international movement to Abolish the Bombs. Check it out. Get the links